Auto discovery of physical volumes is ommitting MPIO devices

[BristleBeard]

Get-LabVolumesOnPhysicalDisks is eliminating MPIO drives as it does it tests for the serial numbers returned from Get-CimInstance Win32_DiskDrives and their existence in $physicalDisks.SerialNumber.

The returned serial number is an array, which doesn't pass the condition.

[raandree]

Actually we did never have the chance to run AL on a computer having MPIO drives attached. Can you propose a code change to fix this or do you have a test machine we can connect to for a short time to fix this ourselves?

[BristleBeard]

I cannot provide access, but I'd be happy to propose a code change. I'll get the specifics and cobble something together.

[raandree]

Thanks in advance for your time. If you need help, please reach out to us.

[BristleBeard]

What's the reasoning on excluding virtual disks? I think part of the issue I'm seeing could be from the disk is inside a thin provisioned storage space. It seems the checking against BusType should be sufficient.

[raandree]

As far as I remember we excluded virtual disk as we did not want to install into a mounted VHD by accident. Also mounted VHDs do not have a serial number and we used the serial number and signature to uniquely identity a disk. However I have looked up the cache and did not find the information there so I am not sure if we still need this info:

Select-Xml -Xml ([xml](Get-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\SOFTWARE\AutomatedLab\Cache -Name LocalDisks).LocalDisks) -XPath //LocalDisk | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Node | ft @{ Name = 'DriveLetter'; Expression = { ([char][int]$_.DriveLetter) } }, Serial, Signature

Does it help to change the lines in AutomatedLabDefinition.psm1 around line 484 and remove the where statements?

$physicalDisks = Get-PhysicalDisk # | Where-Object { $_.BusType -ne 'File Backed Virtual' }
$disks = Get-CimInstance -Class Win32_DiskDrive #|
#Where-Object { $_.SerialNumber } |
#Where-Object { $_.SerialNumber.Trim() -in $physicalDisks.SerialNumber }

Per, what do you think about this?

[BristleBeard]

Commenting out the where statement is exactly the workaround I've been using. In my instance, Get-PhysicalDisk does return a serial number on the storage spaces, but Win32_DiskDrive returns an object for the serial number that doesn't match it.

[raandree]

I have asked Per Pedersen if this change is going to create trouble - he has written the disk measurement and discovery feature. If he agrees, we will make this for V4.