You may find that a disk in Windows Server simply isn’t big enough for your greedy applications. But never fear, the good folks at Microsoft have given us the ability to expand that volume on the fly, as needed by adding other pools of storage or single disks to it. However, it’s important to keep in mind that if you have a highly available volume (let’s just say a RAID6) and you add a single disk to it then you have just effectively lost the high availability for the data stored on the extended portion of the volume. So make sure that the new storage you are adding matches up…
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Xsan: What is Fiber Channel
Fiber Channel is a technology for transmitting data between computer devices similar to SCSI but with networking components based on fiber optics. Fiber Channel is especially suited for attaching computer servers to shared storage devices and for interconnecting storage controllers and drives. Apple uses Fiber Channel for Xsan, it’s storage virtualization platform. All of the objects that make up a Fiber Channel network are referred to as the fabric. These typically include HBAs (the card that goes in a machine), cabling, transceivers, a fiber channel switch and the fiber channel controllers on the storage.
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Zone Defined
A zone in Fibre Channel is a segment of a fabric that is composed of selected targets and initiators. Like with a VLAN, only the members of a zone have access to one another. Simply because the switch allows the members to access one another doesn’t mean you can’t still limit access more granularly. You can use storage-based filters, such as LUN Masking, for which devices can access one another based on WWNN information from the initiator port. With Xsan, you can use LUN Masking to limit which of the hosts on your SAN have access to your Xserve RAIDs. UPDATE: LUN Masking was removed as a feature from the Xserve…
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Xsan: Qlogic Licensing
In order to stack Qlogic switches all 20 ports must be active. Not all ports are active on all switches. Good to know… THIS POSTING IS OUT OF DATE