About identifying the physical disks of a virtual disk

Many storage array enclosures incorporate a set of physical disks that use small status lights to indicate the operational status of physical disks. The Storage Provisioning Option uses these lights with its blink feature to help you quickly identify the physical disks that comprise a virtual disk. When you select the blink feature for a virtual disk, the status lights on the physical disks blink.

Note:

Storage array support for the blink features depends on storage array hardware support for the feature. Not all storage array hardware supports blinking. See your storage array hardware documentation for more information.

You can use the blink feature in different ways. You can use it to assist with:

  • Moving virtual disks from one storage array to another.

    You can use the blink feature when you want to move a virtual disk from one enclosure to another. If you have many enclosures, you can use the blink feature to identify the physical disks that comprise the virtual disk. Without it, determining the physical disks that comprise a virtual disk can be difficult.

  • Identifying problematic physical disks.

    When the Storage Provisioning Option generates an alert for a physical disk issue, you can use the blink feature to assist you in finding problematic physical disks.

When you use the blink feature, the following applies:

  • The blink feature works on one virtual disk at a time.

    You cannot use it to simultaneously identify the physical disks in multiple virtual disks.

See Identifying the physical disks of a virtual disk.

About identifying the physical disks of a virtual disk