Dell MD3000 owner manual Advanced Features, Storage Partitions

•Enabling premium features before migration — Before migrating disk groups and virtual disks, enable the required premium features on the destination storage array. If a disk group is migrated from a storage array that has a premium feature enabled and the destination array does not have this feature enabled, an Out of Compliance error message can be generated. For specific procedures to correct the error, refer to the Recovery Guru.

Disk Roaming

Moving physical disks within an array is called disk roaming. The RAID controller module automatically recognizes the relocated physical disks and logically places them in the proper virtual disks that are part of the disk group. Disk roaming is permitted whether the RAID controller module is either online or powered off.

NOTE: The disk group must be offline before moving the physical disks.

Advanced Features

The RAID enclosure supports several advanced features:

•Storage Partitioning, including host-to-virtual disk mapping

•Virtual Disk Snapshots

•Virtual Disk Copy

NOTE: Virtual Disk Snapshot and Virtual Disk Copy are premium features that must be activated separately. If you have purchased these features, an activation card is supplied that contains instructions for enabling this functionality.

Storage Partitions

Storage partitioning enables hosts to share access to virtual disks in a storage array. A storage partition is a logical entity consisting of one or more virtual disks that can be accessed by a single host or shared among hosts that are part of a host group. To create a storage partition, you first define a host or host group, then define a host-to-virtual disk mapping.

NOTE: You must create a storage partition for each type of host.

Storage partitions give multiple hosts or host groups access to the same host-to-virtual disk mappings. With these mappings, you can control which host or host group may have access to a virtual disk in your storage array.

The first time you map a virtual disk to a specific host or host group, a storage partition is created. Any subsequent mappings to that host or host group do not create new storage partitions.

Under the following conditions, only a single storage partition is required:

•You have only one attached host that will access all of the virtual disks in the storage array. A single host can be attached to only one partition.

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Using Your RAID Enclosure