Promise VTrak E-Class – Storage Configuration

Much like the built-in SAN on the Intel Modular Server the Promise VTrak E310sD and E610sD Dual Controller RAID Systems are quite flexible when it comes to configuring storage.

If no storage configuration has happened on the VTrak yet, the WebPAM PROe console will land on the storage configuration wizard once we log on.

Since we need a few different disk configurations to be made available to our cluster based VMs, we will use the Advanced Configuration option.

Promise VTrak Storage Configuration

Our first step is to create a Disk Array (IMS equivalent is a Storage Group):

We can add as many or as few disks to the Disk Array as we need.

Now, once we have set our Disk Array configuration by choosing the required drives we need to configure the Logical Drives that will reside on the Disk Array.

The Promise process differs from the IMS storage configuration in that on the IMS we would be running each step as its own process. On the Promise VTrak we create the entire storage structure for a group of drives in one process.

• Alias: DA01LD01
• Disk Array 1 Logical Disk 1
• Capacity: 275.31
• .31 represents Disk Array (Storage Group) 3 Logical Disk 1

Once we click the Update button beneath the Logical Drive Creation section we will see:

Take note of the Maximum size noted to the right of the Capacity field when creating the logical drives.

Once we have finished creating the required logical drives we see:

When we click Next we are given a summary of the logical drives to be created. Click Submit on the summary page and eventually we will have our newly created logical drives.

In our case we had two 300GB 15K.7 SAS drives in the VTrak to start with. We received six more drives and installed them today.

So, after deleting the existing array and logical drive that was created on the original two disks any new disk arrays and/or logical disks that incorporate existing disks may require synchronization:

Managing SAN and DAS Storage

When it comes to managing storage from within the node’s Disk Management that .31 or .xx number really helps to figure out which disk belongs to which VM.

This is important because we need to stage storage based on I/O requirements where higher I/O storage will reside on Storage Groups/Disk Arrays with more spindles.

• IMS Storage
• Storage Group 1 (2-4 spindles/SSDs) (XX.0x)
• Hyper-V OS
• Quorum disk if required
• Hyper-V Configuration and memory files
• Storage Group 2 (generally 4 spindles) (XX.1x)
• VM data storage partitions
• Storage Group 3 (6-8 spindles) (XX.2x)
• VM OS partitions
• SQL database partitions
• Promise VTrak
• Disk Array 1 (XX.3x)
• File shares for large file stores
• Disk Array 2 (XX.4x)
• Archival folder shares
• Low I/O Desktop OS VMs

Since the dual quad port SAS connections represent an I/O limitation due to the pipe size we are careful to place lower I/O requirement storage on the VTrak.

Once we have our storage configured on the VTrak the next step is to get that storage available to the Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 cluster nodes on the Intel Modular Server.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer