Seeing More Disks than Allocated in Win2K3 Disk Admin

[itsp1965]

Hi guys please excuse the newbie question but I was allocated 10x18GB LUNs on our SAN and after configuring my HBAs, it can see them fine (I assume). When I am Windows disk administrator though.. I see 40x18GB LUNs avail (disks 0-39). I am assuming this is because of multiple paths to the storage. My question is, how do I format these drives in disk administrator? Do I create a spanned volume using the first 10 and then the other will show up as replicas? Please advise. Thank you.

Regards

Terry

 

[itsp1965]

Further to this post guys I checked the properties of the drives;

Disk Bus Target Lun
0 0 0 0
1 0 0 1
:
10 0 1 0
:
20 0 0 0
:
30 0 1 0

So am I assuming then that disks 0-9 and disk 20-29 are indeed the same (and 10-19 and 30-39 are the same)
Does this mean I see 20 actual disk or is it different paths (don't know if I am making myself clear here). Help

 

[justanotherhack]

this is normal - you'll need a client side utility like powerpath or similiar for failover, etc.

 

[itsp1965]

Thanks bk66md, that's what I kinda figured. I am using the Sansurfer tool for this, but I might need some help from the SAN admins to help with the setup.

 

[comtec17]

This is due to you have multiple paths to the same disk. You will need to install a multipathing software such as powerpath from EMC, MPIO from Microsoft, an RDAC driver, or the software from your hardware vendor. If you were assigned 10 disks then you can figure out which disks are primary by looking at the disk properties and reviewing the LUN #. You only need to format your 10 disks, the others you should ignore.