Restructuring DAS/SAN Storage Requires LD/LUN Initialization

We set up the Promise VTrak E610sD RAID subsystem and its storage for the client deployment we are going to do over the next few days.

In this case we are deploying one Intel Server System SR1695GPRX2AC (1U, Xeon X3470, 32GB, 600GB 15K SAS RAID 10) and the Promise VTrak unit. We will add the second 1U server in their new budget year and enable the cluster setup from there.

We did an initial storage configuration on the VTrak but made a few mistakes on sizes for the VMs that will be hosted by the one Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 node.

So, we needed to wipe the Logical Drives (LDs) and start fresh. Once we did so, we went in and initiated an Initialization sequence on each new Logical Drive that was created.

We initiate the Initialization process because the Hyper-V OS may pick up the previous disk configuration information from the new LD setup.

It can be a bit confusing to be looking in Disk Management and seeing the previous LD”s configuration still listed even after rescanning the disks!

The other consideration in all of this has to do with existing data if there was any. If there were VM VHDs on the LDs or even pass through information on them any new VHD created using VHDTool (previous blog post) would be able to scan the bits and see that existing data using a tool like GetDataBack (beware of imposters).

Initializing on the VTrak does not take a lot of time. So, it is well worth the wait to make sure we have nice client LDs to start with.

Done:

Now off to enable Microsoft MPIO on the node and configure it for performance.

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.

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