Physical disk device is mapping the physical disk to an iSCSI disk. In this case, user can perform low level disk operations on the iSCSI disk, for example, changing the partition of the disk and format a partition with new file system. All the disk operations to iSCSI disk will be bridged to the real physical disk.

Follow the steps below to create a physical disk volume:

Step 1.  Choose iSCSI Media Type

Right click the Virtual Volumes node on the left tree of the SANDeploy Management Console. From the pop-up menu select the Create Virtual Volume... menu item.

Choose Physical disk.
Press the Next button to continue.

Step 2. Select a physical disk

User can select disk from physical disk list.

Read-only access to this device represent the volume is used for read-only purpose, otherwise SANDeploy need to open this drive in exclusive full-access mode.

When you enable the read only option, you can also specify write-back cache to make client writable.

Press the Next button to continue.

Step 3. Set High Speed Cache

User can choose whether use the cache by clicking the Enable high speed cache on this volume option button.

Cache size, represent the cache limitation on the volume.
Cache expiry time,  represent how long the cache data will be saved to hard disk.

We recommend user to use cache enabled if the volume is a diskless boot volume, that will allow to get better performance.

Press the Next button to continue.

Step 4. Set Write-Back Cache

The Write-Back cache feature is used for saving data for workstations that have normal permission.

If user use two or more workstations to boot from the same iSCSI volume, the write-back cache must be enabled.

Click the Enable write-back cache for this volume option button to decide the write-back cache is enabled.
Select a folder to store temporary data, folder must already exist.
Quota for each client, represent that the maximum size of data that client write.

Press the Next button to continue.

Step 5. Finish Volume Creating

Type the volume description, the description will be used for helping user to recognize volume.

Press Finish button to complete the volume creation.