IBM DS6000 Series manual Windows Server 2003 VDS support, 323

–If you reboot a system with adapters while the primary path is in a failed state, you must manually disable the BIOS on the first adapter and manually enable the BIOS on the second adapter. You cannot enable the BIOS for both adapters at the same time. If the BIOS for both adapters is enabled at the same time and there is a path failure on the primary adapter, the system will stop with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error upon reboot.

Windows Server 2003 VDS support

With Windows Server 2003 Microsoft introduced the Virtual Disk Service (VDS). It unifies storage management and provides a single interface for managing block storage virtualization. This interface is vendor and technology neutral, and is independent of the layer where virtualization is done, operating system software, RAID storage hardware, or other storage virtualization engines.

VDS is a set of APIs which uses two sets of providers to manage storage devices. The built-in VDS software providers enable you to manage disks and volumes at the operating system level. VDS hardware providers supplied by the hardware vendor enable you to manage

hardware RAID arrays. Windows Server 2003 components that work with VDS include the Disk Management MMC snap-in, the DiskPart command-line tool, and the DiskRAID command-line tool, which is available in the Windows Server 2003 Deployment Kit. Figure A-1shows the VDS architecture.

Command-Line Tools:	Disk Management	Storage Management
•DiskPart
	MMC Snap-in	Applications
•DiskRAID
	Virtual Disk Service
Software Providers:		Hardware Providers
•Basic Disks
•Dynamic Disks
		Other
		Disk
		Subsystem
HDDs		LUNs
Hardware	DS8000/DS6000
Microsoft Functionality
Non-Microsoft Functionality

Figure A-1 Microsoft VDS Architecture

For a detailed description of VDS, refer to the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Virtual Disk Service Technical Reference at:

http://www.microsoft.com/Resources/Documentation/windowsserv/2003/all/techref/en-us/W2K3TR_ vds_intro.asp

The DS6000 can act as a VDS hardware provider. The implementation is based on the DS Common Information Model (CIM) agent, a middleware application that provides a CIM-compliant interface. The Microsoft Virtual Disk Service uses the CIM technology to list

Appendix A. Operating systems specifics 323