Craig_hannagan
asked on
Disable Disk Initialization Windows Server 2008 R2
Hi,
Currently have an EMC Fibre Channel SAN (CX4-120) that consists of many LUNS of VMFS storage for our VMware environment. We are in the process of implementing a Commvault Backup and DR solution for our Virtual environment. Part of this process is the need to have a physical windows 2008 R2 server that will be connected to the SAN via Fibre Channel that will frequently replicate the VMFS data to our DR site. The concern I have is that this host will see all the VMFS LUNS on the SAN and in windows disk / storage management all the LUNS will appear and the option to intialize them will be available. I am really concerned about someone accidently intializing one / all of these LUNS and therefore losing my VMware storage. My question is, is there a way to disable disk intialization in windows 2008 R2 server? Or is it possible in group policy to disable access to all aspects of disk / storage management? Any advice or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
PS: I have been told the option to make this host only have read only access to the LUNS is not possible as it will need to lock LUN access whilst it performs snapshots etc)
Thanks,
Craig
Currently have an EMC Fibre Channel SAN (CX4-120) that consists of many LUNS of VMFS storage for our VMware environment. We are in the process of implementing a Commvault Backup and DR solution for our Virtual environment. Part of this process is the need to have a physical windows 2008 R2 server that will be connected to the SAN via Fibre Channel that will frequently replicate the VMFS data to our DR site. The concern I have is that this host will see all the VMFS LUNS on the SAN and in windows disk / storage management all the LUNS will appear and the option to intialize them will be available. I am really concerned about someone accidently intializing one / all of these LUNS and therefore losing my VMware storage. My question is, is there a way to disable disk intialization in windows 2008 R2 server? Or is it possible in group policy to disable access to all aspects of disk / storage management? Any advice or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
PS: I have been told the option to make this host only have read only access to the LUNS is not possible as it will need to lock LUN access whilst it performs snapshots etc)
Thanks,
Craig
Its not recommended practice to present LUNs (vmfs) to non ESX hosts, especially Windows that can corrupt the VMFS LUNS.
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Thanks for the infor guys, this really helped.
I found an article that say's windows updates will re-enable Diskpart -automount disable. I'm very scared. Will disabling the disk management keep windows updates from changing this? I think being an update it will supersede anything else.
1linuxed
I've not seen any articles discussing this.
Is the info in this article from a trusted source?
Could you please post the articles URL.
I've not seen any articles discussing this.
Is the info in this article from a trusted source?
Could you please post the articles URL.
I have no clue where I got it yesterday.
To me it's tough to trust it. I'll test it further this week to see what it does.
If the VMFS datastore is being made available to the Windows Server 2008 R2 physical machine, it will initialize the disk and make the VMFS unusable.
I am sure that the Commvault software which you are trying to setup would have an agent that can talk to the vStorage API provided by VMware in order to enable backup and replication of the VMs stored on the VMFS datastore.