In April 2002, Microsoft appointed Bob Muglia senior vice president of the newly formed Enterprise Storage Division. At that time, Muglia described the technology plans that would make Windows act as a hub for managing data across PCs, servers, and storage systems and said Microsoft would take years to develop its data management technology. But just a year later, we're seeing the initial fruits of the company's labor manifested in Windows Server 2003.
Windows 2003 features an improved file system infrastructure; one of the key elements of this infrastructure is the Virtual Disk Service (VDS), which Microsoft designed to facilitate disk and data management. In conjunction with VDS, Microsoft provides in Windows 2003 three powerful tools for working with disks from a variety of vendors: the command-line tools diskraid.exe and diskpart.exe and the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Disk Management snap-in.
VDS Architecture
Storage hardware vendors write a VDS hardware provider that translates general-purpose VDS APIs into specific instructions for their hardware. If you add a storage device that has a VDS hardware provider, Windows 2003 automatically installs and registers the storage device. In this way, Microsoft lets storage manufacturers enable their storage systems to be managed from within the Windows environment instead of through a proprietary management client.
Figure 1 shows the VDS architecture. Blue areas indicate storage hardware. Tan areas identify functionality built into Windows 2003, including the VDS abstraction layer and the Windows 2003 tools for working with VDS. Red sections represent storage vendor software in the form of client tools that integrate into Windows 2003 or hardware providers that tie storage devices to VDS. Note that Windows 2003 includes VDS software providers for both basic and dynamic disks. Basic providers include functionality for partitions and volumes. Dynamic providers include functionality for partitions and mirrored, striped, spanned, and RAID 5 volumes.
By providing a common interface into which storage manufacturers can plug their devices, Microsoft hopes to ease storage administration for Windows users. Manufacturers will probably continue to offer software management tools to exploit the unique capabilities of their hardware devices, but VDS might let storage administrators perform more tasks from one familiar interface, even if they manage different types of storage devices (e.g., RAID, Storage Area Network—SAN) from multiple vendors.
VDS is the foundation for the earlier mentioned DiskRaid and DiskPart command-line tools and the Disk Management snap-in. These three tools use VDS as a common architecture to access storage systems in Windows 2003. You'll find these tools more productive and powerful than previous Microsoft storage tools.
DiskRaid
DiskRaid is a command-line tool that you can use to configure and manage RAID storage subsystems. DiskRaid is in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Deployment Kit and the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit; it isn't part of the OS. DiskRaid requires Windows 2003, and you must be a member of the Administrators group to use the tool.
DiskRaid works with any storage hardware that has a VDS hardware provider. Most storage manufacturers will supply VDS hardware providers with their newer storage systems. Older storage systems might not have VDS hardware providers. VDS must have registered at least one VDS hardware provider before you can use DiskRaid.
After you install DiskRaid, you can start it by typing
diskraid
at a command prompt from the folder in which you installed the tool. Figure 2 shows this command and several other commands entered interactively. Table 1 lists all the DiskRaid commands. To get detailed help for any command, type the command followed by the /? option, for example:
list /?
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