Losing Dynamic Disks on Reboot of Servers

[CoreyWilson]

Hello all,

We have a couple PowerEdge 1950's and 2950’s running Windows 2003 R2 with all patches connected to an EMC AX150i iSCSI SAN using PowerPath 4.5. Some of our volumes on the SAN have been expanded with additional disk space, hence we have had to convert the volume on the Windows servers to dynamic disks to extend the volume to take advantage of the added space.

Whenever we reboot one these servers the dynamic volumes always show as ‘Offline’ in disk manager and we are required to manually reconnect the drive. Any volumes we have configured on the servers that point to the SAN that are Basic disks do not have this problem. We can reboot the servers any of the Basic disks, that are pointing to space on the SAN always reconnect fine.

Is this a bug in Windows? A limitation? Is there some configuration option I am missing? I find it hard to believe this is by design.

Thanks for your assistance.

 

[comtec17]

Why did you choose to use Dynamic Disks versus expanding a LUN?

I believe your issue would have to be around which disk is seen first by the OS, then it will try to piece the volume together, if the wrong disk # comes in first, the volume will not go online automatically.