Let us recall the overall disaster recovery goals: a) Protect your data. b) Recover quickly from
an incident.
In the overall scheme, remember that prevention of data loss is so much better
than disaster recovery.
One urban myth had it that a network manager had a knock on the door, and
there stood a Compaq engineer. 'I have come to replace your disk' he said,
'What disk? I did not order a disk' - demanded the manager. 'No
worries.', replied the engineer, 'our remote monitoring system has spotted the 4th
disk in you array has failed and I have come to fit a new one.'
RAID 1 Disk Mirroring - Protect the Windows Server 2003 operating system with a
mirrored disk.
RAID 5 Striping with Parity - If one disk fails the program carries on thanks to your hardware RAID with a hot
swappable disk.
RAID 0+1 Striping (No parity) for speed, combined with mirroring the whole stripe set for
fault tolerance.
Note: You can only create RAID 5 on Dynamic disk. (So upgrade Basic Disk)
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File and Print: Use RAID 1 array for the OS (Operating System). Use RAID 5 array for data
partitions.
Web Services: Use RAID 1 array for the OS. Use RAID 5 array for data
partitions.
Database Services: Use RAID 1 array for the OS. Use RAID 0+1 for the data
partitions.
With hardware RAID, onboard controller handles the RAID system and not the operating system. Windows Server 2003
'sees' the physical
disk array as a single hard drive. If one hard disk fails in a RAID-1
or RAID-5 implementation, you can rebuild the RAID system and recover all data
from the failed disk. Just press CTRL M during boot and then selecting 'Rebuild'. This recovers the data to its
state immediately before the failure occurred.
You only really need to do this if you are using software RAID.
Hardware RAID has its own utilities which are often placed in the Control Panel.
Click Start (menu), All Programs, Administrative Tools, Computer
Management.
Open 'Storage' and click Disk Management.
Right-click the unallocated space on one of the dynamic disks where the
RAID-0, RAID-1, or RAID-5 volume should be created, and then click 'Create
Volume.'
In the Create Volume wizard, click 'Next,' and then click on the desired
volume type: 'Striped volume,' 'Mirrored volume,' or 'RAID-5 volume.'
In my opinion, favour dynamic disk on server, but stick with basic disk on XP
and other clients. Converting to dynamic disk is irreversible, or at least
you cannot return to basic disk and preserve the data.
Some of the limitations of dynamic disk are not serious, for example you
cannot dual boot into another operating system. However, even this reduces
your options, for instance, you could not install a parallel operating system
for recovering a machine that will not boot. More seriously, your hardware
RAID may not work on dynamic disk, so check with the manufacturers.
Navigate to the Disk Management console.
Right-click the grey 'Disk Description' pane that is located to the left
of the Color-coded volume panes.
Select, Upgrade to Dynamic Disk.' Note you will have to reboot not
once, but twice.
Microsoft provides a disk-partitioning utility called Diskpart which is
particularly useful for scripting disk tasks during unattended setup of Windows
Server 2003. With diskpart you can configure most of the settings found in the
Disk Management GUI. Writing diskpart in to a script is a particularly
easy way of upgrading lots of machines from basic to dynamic disk.
