PlateSpin Migrate provides mechanisms for configuring your migration job to handle your workload volumes and their physical or virtual layout in the target infrastructure. For information about the supported storage, see Supported Workload Storage. Show Storage layout and volume configuration settings depend on the job configuration mode (Advanced or Wizard), migration type, target virtualization platform, and source operating system. The following topics provide additional information: When planning to add physical disk space to existing storage pools and VD, there are several considerations to make before adding the additional physical disks or storage enclosures. For more information about the expanding an existing DSMS solution, see the Dell Storage with Microsoft Storage Spaces Deployment Guide. When adding a new storage enclosure to the SOFS cluster or just new physical disks to an existing storage enclosure follow these guidelines:
After verifying all newly added disks are available to the cluster, you can now create new or expand an existing storage pool or VD. Dell recommends when expanding a storage pool to add physical disks in a quantity equal to the column count multiplied by the number of data copies plus any additional disks required for automatic rebuilds. For example, for a two-way mirror VD, if the column count is four, you must add a minimum of eight disks to the pool to expand the VD. Run the following PowerShell command to find out the number of columns used by a specific VD. Get-VirtualDisk –FriendlyName | FL NumberOfColumns The reason for the recommendation is to ensure that you are able to expand VDs that are already very low on usable disk space. For a write operation to a VD to be successful, data is striped across the number of disks indicated by the column count. If you add fewer disks to the storage pool, there may be new free disk space now in the pool, but you may find you are not able to expand the disk space of the VD, because there will not be enough disks available with free space to allow for a full stripe to be written. For example, for a 2x3 configuration with three DSMS 1400 storage enclosures, each with eight HDDs and four SSDs, a quantity of 24 HDDs and 12 SSDs are included in a storage pool called MyPool1. The pool has one VD that was created by using storage tiers—2wayVD1, with two-way mirroring and a column count of five. The plan is to add an extra DSMS 1400 enclosure with eight new HDDs and four new SSDs. For this example, MyPool1 is full with data and the HDD tier, to where no usable disk space remains in 2wayVD1. Eight new HDDs are added to MyPool1. However, 2wayVD1 has a column count of five, which means a total of 10 disks are required for a full stripe, one stripe across five disks for first data copy and one stripe across another five disks for the second data copy. Because only eight HDDs were added to the pool after the original disks in the pool are out of disk space, the HDD tier cannot be expanded to take advantage of the newly added disk. There is one more factor to consider when adding physical disks or storage enclosures with the intent of expanding existing VDs, which were created with enclosure awareness. Enclosure awareness spreads the data copies of each VD across three or more storage enclosures. However, when adding new physical disks or storage enclosures, VDs created on the newly added storage disk space may not be enclosure aware. This occurs if there is no sufficient free disk space or there are no enough physical disks in existing storage enclosures to spread the new data copies in a method, which satisfies the enclosure awareness requirements. Run the following PowerShell command for adding a new physical disks to an existing pool. Add-PhysicalDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName
-PhysicalDisks -Usage AutoSelect
Run the following PowerShell command for extending a VD with storage tiers. Resize-StorageTier –FriendlyName -Size Run the following PowerShell command for extending a volume. Resize-Partition –DiskNumber -Size For example, a physical disk, which is labeled PhysicalDisk13, is assigned to variable $pd. The disk is then added to an existing pool MyPool1 with the Usage attribute set to AutoSelect. A VD named 2wayVD1, is 30 GB and currently exists in the pool. In this example, the VD is extended to 60 GB, and the volume must be extended to match the new VD size. What happens when you create a virtual hard disk?A virtual hard disk (VHD) is a disk image file format for storing the entire contents of a computer's hard drive. The disk image, sometimes called a virtual machine (VM), replicates an existing hard drive, including all data and structural elements.
What are the advantages of using virtual hard disks?Virtual Hard Disk (VHD)
The advantage of using virtual hard disks is that they are easy to move, backup and restore. If you need to duplicate the virtual hard disk file, it is a simple matter to create a copy of the virtual hard disk file.
What is the difference between a volume and a disk?A volume is a named logical area of the physical disk. It serves as a type of container for the file system and provides a structure for accessing data. In this sense, a volume can be thought of as a logical disk, rather than the physical disk itself.
What is the difference between a virtual disk and a physical disk?A virtual disk is a file or set of files that appears as a physical disk drive to a guest operating system. The files can be on the host machine or on a remote computer.
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