Partitioned shared storage with private dynamic disk group protection

Partitioned shared storage with private dynamic disk group protection allows administrators to partition storage and assign exclusive ownership in a SAN or shared disk array. In early releases of Volume Manager for Windows, partitioned shared storage was implemented through cluster disk groups without the use of a cluster application. In later releases of Volume Manager and Storage Foundation for Windows, the feature of private dynamic disk group protection makes it possible to partition shared storage with a regular dynamic disk group.

Private dynamic disk group protection uses hardware locking techniques to protect secondary dynamic disk groups located on shared storage from access by other hosts connected to the shared storage pool. The hardware locking is implemented by using a SCSI reservation thread to maintain a current reservation for each disk in a protected group.

In later releases of Volume Manager and SFW, partitioned shared storage is available for secondary dynamic disk groups on shared storage. Private dynamic disk group protection can be assigned when a secondary dynamic disk group is created, or it can be added to an existing secondary dynamic disk group. The protection is in place as long as the disk group is imported; and since secondary dynamic disk groups are auto-imported, protected disk groups come online at system startup with a SCSI reservation thread started automatically.

If disks are being added to a dynamic disk group that has a SCSI reservation, they get a reservation automatically. However, if a new disk group is created, you must choose to add private group protection to the disk group.

Private dynamic disk group protection can be removed if the disk group no longer needs protection or is reassigned to another Storage Foundation for Windows host.

The group protection is automatically removed and needs to be added again in the following cases:

Note:

Microsoft Disk Management Disk Groups do not support private dynamic disk group protection.

See Create a new dynamic disk group with private dynamic disk group protection.

See Add private dynamic disk group protection to an existing dynamic disk group.

See Remove private dynamic disk group protection from a dynamic disk group.