Virtual Sizing And Online Capacity Expansion; Location And Enabling; Theory Of Operation - LSI SCSI 320-0 Configuration

9 Virtual Sizing and Online Capacity
Expansion
Virtual Sizing is a unique feature designed by LSI Logic. With virtual sizing, the
Administrator can use the disk space of a hard drive that was just added to an
existing disk array, without rebooting the operating system.
Virtual Sizing supports Windows NT 4.x, Windows 2000 (only supported for
Basic Disk), and NetWare 4.x, 5.x only.

Location and Enabling

The Virtual Sizing option is found in the Boot Up Configuration Manager. This
option is in the Objects menu, under Logical Drive and View/Update
Configuration. Enable this option after you configure a logical drive and before
you exit the Boot Up Configuration Manager.
The ability to use this feature for an existing logical drive depends on the
firmware version. Older firmware versions may not allow you to enable this
feature once you have saved the configuration.
The Virtual Sizing option is in Power Console Plus versions 1.06 and higher.
When you select this option in Power Console Plus, you must restart the
operating system before Disk Administrator will see the virtual size.

Theory of Operation

When the operating system boots, it looks for storage devices such as HDD,
CD-ROMs, and tape drives. The controller reports these devices to the operating
system, except for the HDD. The controller reports a false disk capacity for the
configured Logical Drive. The value reported to NT's Disk Administrator is
approximately 80GB for older firmware, and 500GB for newer firmware.
Because Disk Administrator recognizes a virtual storage capacity of 80 or 500
GB, the user or Administrator can create logical drive partitions in the free space
on the virtual disk. In other words, the capacity is already present before the
HDD is added, so you do not need to shut down and reboot the operating system
to see the added capacity.
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