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September 28th, 2014 04:00

Anyway to identify virtual disk from within windows

R515/H700

Dells OMSA  allows to create virtual disks and assign a name to them.

That disk will appear in windows server manager.

In a scenario of having created several (identical) Virtual disks (eg vdisk1, vdisk2 and vdisk3). Is there a way to identify the three new disks that appear in windows as being vdisk1, 2 or 3???

I was hoping the name I created in OMSA would be carried through to the OS. However windows appears to just get a generic name of "H700 disk" (I may be wrong about the wording)

I did google it but only picked up a "tip" that I should create the virtual disks slightly different sizes in order to identify them. However very few people have asked the question. This means one for the following

1) There is a straight forward method I am missing

2) Something in my  setup is not working.

11 Legend

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16.3K Posts

September 28th, 2014 07:00

No, Windows doesn't name "disks", it enumerates them - Disk 0, Disk 1, etc.  You can change the names of "drives" (volumes), but not "disks".

This will probably work if each "disk" contains a single volume:  Say Disk 0 is your OS (C:), Disk 1 is your Exchange database (E:), and Disk 2 is for your logs (L:).  You can change the names of those drives to look something like this:

  

However, the "disks" are still labeled "Disk 0", etc.:

This would help you keep them straight when working with Windows.  What exactly are you trying to do?

September 28th, 2014 08:00

As ever thank you for your reply:emotion-2:

I have inherited a system of

C: 273GB ; D; 3.4TB ;E: 3.4TB ;F  3.4TB

In omsa I can see four virtual disks. The first Virtual disk is  comprised of two dsks in a mirror. This is (of course) the C: drive.

However there are then three identical Virtual Disks comprised of four disks each.

As an example one of the three Virtual Disks is comprised of 1.2tb SAS disks in slots 0 to 3. Just for reference I would like to know which disk this actually is, is it D:, E: or F.

For instance if OMSA lerts me that the disk in  slot 6 is  reporting imminent failure I I may wish to do an emergency backup of it, but I would need to know which disk needs backing up

Is there a way to look at the info on the F: drive and be able to link it to a particular Virtual Disk?

11 Legend

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16.3K Posts

September 28th, 2014 15:00

Disk Management will show you which "disk" contains which volumes/drive letters, then you can name them appropriately, if you want - you could even name the D: drive something like "VD01" or "MUSIC-VD01".  That would help you visually and easily know which volume belonged to which RAID array.  Otherwise, Windows has NO knowledge of the individual disks that make up the array.  Both OS and OMSA are needed to determine which VD's contain which data.

For instance if OMSA lerts me that the disk in  slot 6 is  reporting imminent failure I I may wish to do an emergency backup of it, but I would need to know which disk needs backing up

Now, when talking about individual disks that make up an array, it is not possible from the OS/file system level to create a backup of one of those member disks.  If running a redundant array (anything but RAID 0), there is also no need to create a backup of an individual disk's contents, so there is no way to do this from the hardware's perspective; you simply remove the disk and replace it with another (or even rebuild the same disk if it is offline but healthy) then rebuild it to match the data in the array.  If OMSA alerts you that disk 6 is pred fail, you don't create a backup of that disk, you simply replace it with a healthy disk; you should always have a good backup of the entire contents of an array (not individual disks in the array), regardless of disk/array health (don't wait for failure/pred fail).

September 29th, 2014 03:00

I was able to use "omreport storage vdisk" to get the relevant info.

It listed all of the vdisks, and one attribute it had was "device", this value referenced the windows disk number.

Using this information I was able to match up   the vdisk name and the OS disk name. I edited the values so they matched. 

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