Initial Slow LUN Scan With Many LUNs in Disk Management

Storage Tester · Guest

Hello, I've noticed on both Windows 2000 and 2003 servers that the initial
scanning of a single external enterprise storage device that is configured to
display many LUNs (anywhere from 16-254 LUNs per port) can take an extremely
long time. If Disk Management is open, you'll see the individual LUNs appear
at a frequency of one every few seconds, or you might see a LUN that will
appear and disappear for a period of time as all LUNs are being scanned.
Oddly enough, if the storage device is only configured for 16 LUNs or fewer,
the scan is nearly immediate. I have seen this behaviour across multiple
Fibre Channel adapters and external storage devices, so I do not believe that
this behaviour is HW specific. Also, FC traces show that the OS is simply
slowly scanning the individual drives. Has anyone observed this and is there
a
workaround to faster scanning of large LUN configurations? Thanks.