About configuring storage pools

Access Appliance uses storage pools to provision storage. Pools are more a logical construct rather than an architectural component. Pools are loosely collections of disks.

In the Access Appliance context, a disk is a LUN provisioned from a storage array. Each LUN should be provisioned to all Access Appliance nodes. Disks must be added to pools before you use them.

During the initial configuration, you create storage pools, to discover disks, and to assign them to pools. Disk discovery and pool assignment are done once. Access Appliance propagates the disk information to all the cluster nodes.

You must first create storage pools that can be used to build file systems on.

By default, all of the storage pools in Access Appliance share the same configuration. Copies of the configuration reside on disks in the storage pools. The first storage pool you create uses the default configuration. You can create additional storage pools to be part of that default configuration or to be isolated. An isolated storage pool protects the pool from losing the associated metadata even if all configuration disks in the main storage pool fail. If isolated storage pools exist, you cannot remove the disks from a non-isolated pool which has an internal file system. You also cannot destroy a non-isolated pool if it is the last remaining non-isolated pool.