Hope that help ThorstenWujek. Hi Thorsten Thanks for your support. Disk Id means the number associated with each disk in Disk management? Also SQL database is running on cluster. After the VM import do we loose any cluster disk or quorum information, if so how can we rebuild it? Also can you provide me any links? Thanks in advance Regards Lal Server Engineer. Monday, October 26, PM.
Hi, what do you mean with VM import. I was not aware, that you are trying to virtualize. Can you describe in detail what you are planning to do and what you want to achive? Bye ThorstenWujek. There really is no need for dynamic disks in a cluster if you've got a SAN that allows you to expand storage on the back end. Migrate to a larger GPT disks would be my recommendation rather than introducing a software solution. Dynamic disks offer greater flexibility for volume management because they use a database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and about other dynamic disks in the computer.
Because each dynamic disk in a computer stores a replica of the dynamic disk database, for example, a corrupted dynamic disk database can repair one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk. The location of the database is determined by the partition style of the disk. Dynamic disks are a separate form of volume management that allows volumes to have noncontiguous extents on one or more physical disks. These features enable you to perform tasks such as converting basic disks into dynamic disks, and creating fault-tolerant volumes.
To encourage the use of dynamic disks, multi-partition volume support was removed from basic disks, and is now exclusively supported on dynamic disks. Another difference between basic and dynamic disks is that dynamic disk volumes can be composed of a set of noncontiguous extents on one or multiple physical disks. By contrast, a volume on a basic disk consists of one set of contiguous extents on a single disk. Because of the location and size of the disk space needed by the LDM database, Windows cannot convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk unless there is at least 1 MB of unused space on the disk.
Regardless of whether the dynamic disks on a system use the MBR or GPT partition style, you can create up to 2, dynamic volumes on a system, although the recommended number of dynamic volumes is 32 or less. For details and other considerations about using dynamic disks and volumes, see Dynamic disks and volumes.
Unless specified otherwise, Windows initially partitions a drive as a basic disk by default. You must explicitly convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk. However, there are disk space considerations that must be accounted for before you attempt to do this. Partition styles , also sometimes called partition schemes , is a term that refers to the particular underlying structure of the disk layout and how the partitioning is actually arranged, what the capabilities are, and also what the limitations are.
To boot Windows, the BIOS implementations in xbased and xbased computers require a basic disk that must contain at least one master boot record MBR partition marked as active where information about the Windows operating system but not necessarily the entire operating system installation and where information about the partitions on the disk are stored.
This information is placed in separate places, and these two places may be located in separate partitions or in a single partition. All other physical disk storage can be set up as various combinations of the two available partition styles, described in the following sections. For more information about other system types, see the TechNet topic on partition styles. This can be accomplished using the in-box Storage Spaces feature. Spaces creates resilient storage with software from external shared JBOD's, and is fully supported on a Failover Cluster.
Spanning Volumes With spanning volumes, that really is a matter of how you do your SAN management when increasing capacity. Most storage arrays these days support dynamically expanding the size of a LUN.
As I said earlier, with Basic disks you can dynamically increase the size of that volume to match the new larger LUNs. You can also use Thin Provisioning to create LUN's, but not fully allocate the disk space at provisioning time. With Storage Spaces you can use a Simple Space to combine multiple physical disks into a single logical volume, however Spaces is designed to be a SAN alternative So it's not the right solution for what most people are looking for in this specific scenario.
As mentioned, using Dynamic Disks do provide a great add-on product that extends the functionality of Failover Clustering. You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in. Diskpart is available as a download utility for Windows and is included in the product in Windows Server You can also use Diskpart on Failover Cluster volumes to dynamically extend volumes with no down time.
Here's a KB that discusses how to use Diskpart on clusters: How to extend the partition of a cluster shared disk. You can also use dynamic disks to create spanned volumes, where a volume can be dynamically extended to all another separate physical LUN, and extend the single logical volume over multiple LUN's.
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