Dell MD3200, MD3220 owner manual Creating a Virtual Disk Copy, Before you Begin, 168

Creating a Virtual Disk Copy

CAUTION: Possible loss of data – Source virtual disks that are participating in a virtual disk copy are available for read I/O activity only while a virtual disk copy has a status of In Progress or Pending. Write requests are allowed after the virtual disk copy has completed. If the source virtual disk is formatted with a journaling file system, any attempt to issue a read request to the source virtual disk may be rejected by the storage array, and an error message may be displayed. The journaling file system driver issues a write request before it attempts to issue the read request. The storage array rejects the write request, and the read request may not be issued due to the rejected write request. This condition may result in an error message to be displayed, which indicates that the source virtual disk is write protected.To prevent this issue from occurring, do not attempt to access a source virtual disk that is participating in a virtual disk copy while the virtual disk copy has a status of In Progress. Also, make sure that the Read-Only attribute for the target virtual disk is disabled after the virtual disk copy has completed to prevent error messages from being displayed.

The Virtual Disk Copy premium feature includes:

•The Create Copy Wizard, which assists in creating a virtual disk copy

•The Copy Manager, which monitors virtual disk copies after they are created

Before you Begin

A virtual disk copy fails all snapshot virtual disks that are associated with the target virtual disk, if any exist. If you select a source virtual disk of a snapshot virtual disk, you must disable all of the snapshot virtual disks that are associated with the source virtual disk before you can select it as a target virtual disk. Otherwise, the source virtual disk cannot be used as a target virtual disk.

A virtual disk copy overwrites data on the target virtual disk and automatically makes the target virtual disk read-only to hosts

If 16 virtual disk copies with the status of In Progress exist, any subsequent virtual disk copy has the status Pending, which stays until one of the 16 virtual disk copies complete.

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Configuration: Premium Feature—Virtual Disk Copy