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1 Rookie
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35 Posts
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March 9th, 2012 14:00
Virtual drives and physical drives
ok i just recieved my new NX3100 and i am a little confused. When i look at my OpenManage Server Admin i see physical disks 0-13 spun up and running. NExt i look at my virtual disks and i see my 7 virtual disks. Now VD disk 0 is my boot disk and it is smaller than the others which is what i figured. When i click on VD1 and it shows me the physical disks that are associated with VD1 it lists all of my physical disks. Matter fo fact when i click on any of the the virtual disks it does this. Now what have ia missed about virutal disks? Are they now spanning across mutliple disks that could also have another virtual disk on that phyiscal disk? Thanks.
tommo666
4 Apprentice
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1.2K Posts
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March 9th, 2012 14:00
OK, physical disks are the lumps that sit in the front of the server or external array. The 3.5inch disks. IE disk 0:0, 0:1, 0:2 etc. The virtual disk is the end result of the raid configuration. If the virtual disk is made up of all the physical disks into one huge chunk of storage. Then the other virtual disks are carved out of the total. On a desktop It's like creating a smallish c: drive for the os then creating a d: drive with the rest of the space. This is done by the OS. The raid contoller presents these virtual disks as individual primary disks. not as a primary and extended partitions. I don't know how the NX handles the virtual disks but that's the basic between physical and virtual.
theflash1932
11 Legend
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16.3K Posts
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March 9th, 2012 14:00
It is possible to create multiple arrays (virtual disks) across a given set of physical disks. This is called slicing. This is most often done when using, say, four 2TB physical disks in a RAID 5 (so a VD of 6GB - and either the system doesn't support UEFI or the OS cannot boot to that large of disk), so a smaller VD is carved out for the boot "disk" and the rest of the space is used for storage. The only other option would be to split the four drives into two RAID 1 configurations - small enough for the OS to handle booting to it, but then who needs a 2TB boot drive/partition. I'm not familiar with the NX, but as long as it uses a standard RAID controller, it can be reconfigured if you want, but you may need to split off two of the drives as a RAID 1 for the boot VD - depending on your OS and system capabilities.