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number of disks that can be allocated to windows 2003

 
Dead ID
Occasional Contributor

‎09-13-2005 08:33 AM

‎09-13-2005 08:33 AM

number of disks that can be allocated to windows 2003

Hi

We are trying to find the limit to the number of volumes that windows 2003 can maintain (not drive letters but disk).

Holding things together in my environment
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4 REPLIES 4
Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

‎09-13-2005 09:39 AM

‎09-13-2005 09:39 AM

Re: number of disks that can be allocated to windows 2003

Harry:


Are you talking Physical disks? or Logical Disks?

There are several different ways to look at this. Since Windows 2003 allows the mounting of disks to existing volumes (in this case, disks with Drive Letters) you can physically have more disks than the drive letter limit (c:-z: or 24).

In Logical terms, there could be MANY physical disks that represent 1 logical disk, as many as 240 and even more with different Storage Subsystems. These subsystems have a limit though to how many "logical or virtual disks" you can present to a Windows 2003 server.

For instance...
A Windows server with a single HBA utilizing a single EVA can have up to 255 Logical Units presented to it. (hope I read that correctly)

Based on that, we know that you can at least present 255 disks to Windows 2003 server.


Any particular reason why you need to know if it can handle more than lets say.... 25 or even 50 disks (physical or logical)?

Potentially, having that many disks could become a "bad design".


Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
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Dead ID
Occasional Contributor

‎09-13-2005 09:46 AM

‎09-13-2005 09:46 AM

Re: number of disks that can be allocated to windows 2003

Hi Steve

We needed to know how many xp512/xp12000 luns a windows2003 can handle, single HBA and 2 HBAs.
Holding things together in my environment
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Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

‎09-13-2005 10:52 AM

‎09-13-2005 10:52 AM

Re: number of disks that can be allocated to windows 2003

Harry:


One of the guides that should be useful is the SAN Design Guide (though I can not seem to find any reference to maximum presentations per hba/server for the XP systems)...

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00403562/c00403562.pdf

Thats the best I can do as I am not familiar with the XP as I am with the EVA. i am sure someone else will have an answer for you sometime soon.


Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
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Stephen Grimmer
Trusted Contributor

‎09-13-2005 01:33 PM

‎09-13-2005 01:33 PM

Re: number of disks that can be allocated to windows 2003

I agree with the potential bad design part.... I don't what the limit is myself but there isn't much of a point to go past 25 or so...

based on this article w2003 can support a whole whole lot... I doubt that anyone has actually tried it though...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310072
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