Understanding logical device configuration

When you create an disk group, you group physical drives into one storage area. You can define this storage area as a single logical device, or you can subdivide it into several logical devices. Each logical device is displayed to the operating system as a single physical drive.

The controller supports up to eight logical devices. If you have only one disk group, you can define it as a single logical device, or you can divide it into several logical devices. Typically, the first logical device that you define will be your startup (boot) drive. If you have two or more disk groups, each disk group can be one logical device, or you can divide each disk group into multiple logical drives, as long as the total number of logical devices for all of the disk groups does not exceed eight.

If you do not define a logical device for every disk group, the HP Storage Manager will define a logical device with the largest capacity and highest RAID level possible.

Limitations to consider

• You can have a maximum of eight disk groups on a controller.
• You can have a maximum of eight logical devices on a controller.
• If any existing logical devices are defined as RAID level-5E, you can have only seven logical devices on a controller.

More information

• Selecting the logical device size
• Selecting the RAID level by disk group capacity
• Example: Logical device configurations
• Creating logical devices (action)
• Configuring RAID and creating disk groups (action)
• Creating logical devices in the wizard

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