HP OpenView Storage Volume Growth

[AZNETPLUS]

I'm in the process of installing Exchange 2003 in a 3 node cluster and had a question on the best practice of installing HP OpenView Storage Volume Growth.

We started out using Virtual Replicator, but had problems with the Windows Server 2003 Nodes blue screening and after talking to an HP Engineer, he said to remove the Virtual Replicator as it is over complicating things and to use Storage Volume Growth, but did not go into details of the installation.

On the Virtual Replicator I was told to Install the Virtual Replicator after creating the quorum drive and to create the drive pool and drive with the Virtual Replicator.

So my question is:

Do I follow the same installation and creation of the drive pool and drives with the Storage Volume Growth as I did with Virtual Replicator or can I create the drive use Diskpart.exe and finish my Exchange installation and then when I receive the Storage Volume Growth software from HP install the software without any problems or lose any of the functionality of the Storage Volume Growth software?

[Steven Clementi]

Storage Volume Growth is a utility used to extend a Windows Partition after increasing its virtual size on your storage system.

Example: You have an EVA and a WIndows Host. You allocate a 1GB Virtual Disk to the host. You format the disk and start using it. You then realize you need 2GB of space. You first go to COmmand View EVA and extend the virtual disk to 2GB. Windows see's the extra 1GB of space, but see's it as "extra" unpartitioned space on the existing drive. You open Storage Volume Growth and run the utility to extend the original 1GB partition to the full 2GB's available.


Virtual Replicator is software that allows you to pool disks and virtual manage your storage, as well as create snapshots of those disks.

2 totally different concepts.


Assuming you have an EVA, you do not need Virtual Replicator. Especially if you have Business Copy for your EVA.

Storage Volume Growth is basically the same as diskpart.exe, except that it is in a GUI.


Steven