Companies should move the basic disks to a dynamic disk. Some advantages of dynamic disks are compelling because they have more features than basic disks. On the other hand, using basic disks allow for backward compatibility. Basic disks use standard storage management like partitioning. In Windows 2008 it is limited to using basic disks because they use new features like mirroring and RAID 5. Since the company is using newer systems and not using backward compatibility, we shouldn’t use basic disks.

Advantages of Dynamic Disks
• More volumes on one disk (No Partitioning)
• Spanned Volumes easy to configure
• RAID 0,1,5
• Can be reactivated


Converting Basic to dynamic Disks
1. Go to computer management in administrative tools
2. Go to storage under the tree
3. Go to disk management (in the tree)
4. Right-click the disk you’re converting
5. Click convert to a dynamic disk and click OK
6. Agree and Click Yes to all the next steps such as knowing the disk will be dismounted
7. Close the tool and now you are converted

Case Project 7-2:

The best choice id recommends as an IT expert would be disk duplexing. The reason I say this is because there are two of everything (disk adapter, cables, and drives). In the unlikely event of a disk failure recovering, the system will be quick and easy.

Disk Duplexing set up
1. For the process to go smoothly we need to arrange a time for all the systems to go down and back
2. Install the hardware (adapter, cable, disk drive)
3. Convert the disk to dynamic
4. Create a mirrored volume also known as RAID 1 using the disk management tool.
5. Right-click the unallocated area on the disk and click on the New Mirrored Volume tab.
5. Bring system online and test to ensure financially is at its peak.

Case Project 7-3

I would recommend using dynamic disks with raid 5. The reason for this recommendation is that it offers a fault tolerance for many disks in an array. The size and number of disks would be determined by the size of our current databases, and our expected growth for like 5 years for example. Furthermore, using raid05 with more disks offers more disk space. This is because there is less total space used for the parity.

I would also say the iSCSI SAN can be seen as an architecture used for consolidating the storage into a SAN. This allows it to be accessed by all the Datacenter Servers.
iSCSI Advantages
• Topologies more configurable
• Inexpensive
• Fewer distance limitations
• IPv4 and IPv6 compatible over Ethernet
• Dynamic expansion allowed
• Overall, more configurable
• Increased Storage capacity
• More Scalable
• IPsec support
• Easier for expansion with hardware from different vendors

In conclusion, iSCSI SAN can be used and set up with more switches for Multipath I/O. The fault tolerance then increases in the event one path is offline. Windows Server 2008 has the functionality for Multipath I/O and Storage Manager for SANs tool.

Case Project 7-4:

Since Fresh Recipes is starting to have exponential growth in the company, we need to look at how we perform our backups. As the company grows our full backups are going to take much longer than in the beginning stages of our company. Instead of manually backing up the server we can use the Windows Server Backup tool. We can set it up to do a full back up on Saturday or Sunday, and incremental backups the rest of the week. We must configure the backup performance options to custom.

We shouldn’t have server administrators manually back up the server when we have the tools to save their time. They can use the Backup Schedule option in the Windows Server backup tool. They can now save those hours and have it back up whatever time they would like. We can also incorporate an off-site backup service to mitigate the risk of a disaster destroying our server. This ensures that we still have a backup of our system safe and sound.