Configuring Your Storage

SIOS Protection Suite may be used with either shared storage or with replicated storage. Follow the instructions that apply to your configuration below.

Shared Storage Configuration

If you are using shared storage, then after your Windows environment is installed, you should set the host adapter and shared peripheral addressing.

Note: Dynamic disks are not supported with Shared Storage because the dynamic disk configuration is stored somewhere (undocumented) on each system, not on the disks themselves. There is currently no way to replicate that configuration between the two systems.

Refer to the documentation accompanying your adapter and storage device for specific details. Perform the following tasks to configure your shared storage for access by all servers in the SIOS Protection Suite cluster:

1. Because all disks placed under SIOS Protection Suite protection must be partitioned, your shared disk arrays must now be configured into partitions (volumes) using the Windows Disk Management utility. You should also format the partitions with the NTFS file system.

Note: To safely configure your shared storage, it is recommended that you follow the procedure in Safe Creation of Shared Disk Volume Instances.

You should refer to your disk array software documentation for detailed instructions.

2. If you plan to use a Shared Disk comm path, designate a small raw (unformatted) partition to use for the comm path. One MB should be a sufficient size.

3. Power on the other server(s) in the cluster and verify that all servers recognize the shared disks. From the backup server(s), make drive assignments for the shared volumes exactly the same as the first server. It is recommended that you have the Disk Management utility open on only one server at a time.

4. If you have created file shares on the shared volumes, you will need to turn on the file sharing attribute of these folders on each server in the cluster.

Replicated Volume Configuration

If you are using SIOS DataKeeper for Windows, create your disk partitions (volumes) to be replicated using the Windows Disk Management utility. You should also format the partitions with the NTFS file system.

Be sure to assign the same drive letter to the source volume (on the primary server) and target volume (on the backup server).