In Storage Foundation, providers are similar to drivers. Each provider manages a specific hardware or software storage component. For example, there is a disk provider that manages all disks that the Windows operating system sees as disks. The providers discover the existing physical and logical entities and store that information in the Storage Foundation distributed database.

If you receive an error at Storage Foundation startup that a provider failed to load, you can check the provider status by right-clicking the managed server node in the Veritas Enterprise Administrator tree view and selecting Properties from the context menu that appears.

The top section of the window displays the loaded providers. The bottom section of the window displays any providers that failed to load. Normally, the bottom section is blank.

If a certain provider failed to load at SFW startup, the features that the provider supplies does not work in SFW. It is necessary to determine why the provider did not load and start the application again. For assistance, contact Veritas Technical Support.