Data Storage
Having problems using diskpart in Windows 7 or Windows 2008?
Do you get errors such as “Disk is offline because of policy set by administrator” or “media is write protected” when trying to create partitions in Windows, especially for SAN storage volumes or LUNs?
Have no fear, there are easy fixes for both. These usually occur on SAN disks presented to Windows servers, either physical or virtual.
Issuing the following commands will solve both problems per incident. Below that I posted an option to avoid the offline disk problem on each server for the future by changing the policy per server.
Digital storage is relatively cheap these days. You can buy a 2 TB hard drive for home for about $60 on sale. I’m a geek and when the PS3 slim came out I figured it was a good time to get this BluRay player, game system, and media center all in one. The problem is, 160 GB doesn’t hold a ton, they don’t tell you that Dolby Digital (via bitstream) is off by default even for DVD/BluRay discs, and there is no easy way to play movies or FLAC files.
If you’re scratching your head at some of the letters I just spit out, let’s rewind a bit. Below I will list a common ailment with home media and PS3, and my recommendations for a fix.
An old problem has resurfaced with Linksys NAS devices and Vista, perhaps it occurs with other NAS devices as well. I believe this was fixed in Windows 7, but wanted to post this in case anyone is still experiencing this issue. Your NAS is almost certainly using CIFS, and Vista’s CIFS uses SMB2. By default Vista will only authenticate using NTLMv2, which, although not quite as good as Kerberos, is good in and of itself from a security standpoint, but is bad when trying to talk to your Linksys NAS that probably wants LM/NTLM, aka hashed password that can be cracked.
Read the rest of Having trouble with Windows talking to your NAS?
A new way to expand a VMFS Datastore: Expand a LUN on the SAN to the desired size (up to 2 TB), then expanding the VMFS datastore from your VSphere Client.
Virtualization is a big buzzword right now, and for good reason. The more we virtualize, the more flexibility we build into our infrastructure. What we are really talking about is providing a layer of abstraction between our resources. The entire IT industry is moving in this direction and it’s fantastic. Swapping server hardware has never been [...]
(originally written in 2008) Deduplication has piqued the curiousity of CTOs and storage managers for a couple years, but is still in its infancy. Being able to restore a 5-year old file remotely within minutes while not having to increase fast disk (read “expensive”) storage capacity is certainly appealing. Gone will be the old days [...]
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