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Appendix A. Operating systems specifics 323
– If you reboot a system with adapters while the primary path is in a failed state, you
must manually disable the BIOS on the first adapter and manually enable the BIOS on
the second adapter. You cannot enable the BIOS for both adapters at the same time. If
the BIOS for both adapters is enabled at the same time and there is a path failure on
the primary adapter, the system will stop with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE
error upon reboot.
Windows Server 2003 VDS support
With Windows Server 2003 Microsoft introduced the Virtual Disk Service (VDS). It unifies
storage management and provides a single interface for managing block storage
virtualization. This interface is vendor and technology neutral, and is independent of the layer
where virtualization is done, operating system software, RAID storage hardware, or other
storage virtualization engines.
VDS is a set of APIs which uses two sets of providers to manage storage devices. The built-in
VDS software providers enable you to manage disks and volumes at the operating system
level. VDS hardware providers supplied by the hardware vendor enable you to manage
hardware RAID arrays. Windows Server 2003 components that work with VDS include the
Disk Management MMC snap-in, the
DiskPart command-line tool, and the DiskRAID
command-line tool, which is available in the Windows Server 2003 Deployment Kit.
Figure A-1 shows the VDS architecture.
Figure A-1 Microsoft VDS Architecture
For a detailed description of VDS, refer to the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Virtual Disk
Service Technical Reference
at:
http://www.microsoft.com/Resources/Documentation/windowsserv/2003/all/techref/en-us/W2K3TR_
vds_intro.asp
The DS6000 can act as a VDS hardware provider. The implementation is based on the DS
Common Information Model (CIM) agent, a middleware application that provides a
CIM-compliant interface. The Microsoft Virtual Disk Service uses the CIM technology to list
Software Providers:
•Basic Disks
•Dynamic Disks
Disk Management
MMC Snap-in
Hardware Providers
Virtual Disk Service
Command-Line Tools:
•DiskPart
•DiskRAID
Storage Management
Applications
LUNs
Other
Disk
Subsystem
DS8000/DS6000
HDDs
Non-Microsoft Functionality
Hardware
Microsoft Functionality
Software Providers:
•Basic Disks
•Dynamic Disks
Disk Management
MMC Snap-in
Hardware Providers
Virtual Disk Service
Command-Line Tools:
•DiskPart
•DiskRAID
Storage Management
Applications
LUNs
Other
Disk
Subsystem
DS8000/DS6000
HDDs
Non-Microsoft Functionality
Hardware
Microsoft Functionality