Dell EMC PowerVault MD 34XX/38XX Series Storage Arrays Administrator's Guide

Physical disks in your storage array provide the physical storage capacity for your data. Before you can begin writing data to the storage array, you must configure the physical storage capacity into logical components, called disk groups and virtual disks.

A virtual disk is a partition in a disk group that is made up of contiguous data segments of the physical disks in the disk group. A virtual disk consists of data segments from all physical disks in the disk group.

All virtual disks in a disk group support the same RAID level. The storage array supports up to 255 virtual disks (minimum size of 10 MB each) that can be assigned to host servers. Each virtual disk is assigned a Logical Unit Number (LUN) that is recognized by the host operating system.

Virtual disks and disk groups are set up according to how you plan to organize your data. For example, you can have one virtual disk for inventory, a second virtual disk for financial and tax information, and so on.