Acronis Backup for VMware 9 - User Guide - Manual (Page 122)

122 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2013
Dynamic disk
A hard disk managed by Logical Disk Manager (LDM) that is available in Windows starting with
Windows 2000. LDM helps flexibly allocate volumes on a storage device for better fault tolerance,
better performance or larger volume size.
A dynamic disk can use either the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition
style. In addition to MBR or GPT, each dynamic disk has a hidden database where the LDM stores the
dynamic volumes' configuration. Each dynamic disk holds the complete information about all
dynamic volumes existing in the disk group which makes for better storage reliability. The database
occupies the last 1MB of an MBR disk. On a GPT disk, Windows creates the dedicated LDM Metadata
partition, taking space from the Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR).
Disk 1 MBR LDM
database
1 MB
Disk 2 Protective
MBR
GPT Microsoft
Reserved
Partition (MSR) LDM
database GPT
LDM Metadata
partition
1 MB
Dynamic disks organized on MBR (Disk 1) and GPT (Disk 2) disks.
For more information about dynamic disks please refer to the following Microsoft knowledge base
articles:
Disk Management (Windows XP Professional Resource Kit)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457110.aspx.
816307 Best practices for using dynamic disks on Windows Server 2003-based computers
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816307.
Dynamic volume
Any volume located on dynamic disks (p. 122), or more precisely, on a disk group (p. 121). Dynamic
volumes can span multiple disks. Dynamic volumes are usually configured depending on the desired
goal:

To increase the volume size (a spanned volume).