GPT Vs MBR When Creating a New Windows Server

GPT or MBR? BIOS or UEFI? When creating my server what do I pick? It's probably come up a lot, especially for those people in the consulting area installing Small Company Server 2008 or 2011.With large volume drives (> 1TB) being the norm in server deployments as of late, your decision to choose GPT or MBR partitioning is needed. And with this conclusion, you have to also decide on setting up your server with UEFI or standard BIOS. Remember that this choice must be made early in your server deployment planning period. Volume designs, your RAID selection setup, and copy strategies may all play a large part within your planning.Without entering too much detail, the most volume dimension that MBR can handle is 2TB. In theory a GPT partition are designed for partitions all the way to 18 exabytes in size. MBR and gpt partitions can not dwell on a single physical disk or logical selection. Still another aspect to bear in mind with MBR partitioned disks is that as you can make partitions on disks larger than 2TB by developing multiple partitions, an actual disk with a boot partition will never be able to access more than 2TB of total area. This might appear puzzling, but one example will be a 3TB RAID5 array with a 300GB, bootable C: travel. In theory one would have approximately 2.5 TB of workable unallocated space, nevertheless, due to MBR limits on a bootable travel, you'd only be able to format 1.7TB, the relaxation of the space would always stay unallocated and useless without reconfiguring the disk partitioning scheme.A answer to the above scenario would have been to create the server being a UEFI based system (if supported), and to have prepared the above surfaces using GPT. This would have allowed for a 2.5 TB huge data partition, and divorce the drive as desired, including the 300GB bootable partition. Another alternative would be to have installed the operating system on a RAID1 array comprised of an inferior MBR partition, and held the data on a remote RAID5 array for data storage purposes.As far as operating system support is concerned, GPT partitions can be utilized as data partitions under Server 2003 SP1 and higher, Windows XP x64, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2. The 32 bit edition of Windows XP can not see GPT disk partitions.Booting from a GPT disk is only supported over a UEFI system with 64 bit versions of-the above-mentioned operating system (except Windows XP x64, which only facilitates GPT for data partitions ) Server 2008.Earlier in this article I'd written about planning around your copies as well. GPT partition help from photograph based backup services and products such as for instance Symantec System Recovery and Restore and Acronis Backup are debateable at most readily useful. A write-up from Symantec regarding their System Recovery type of goods states: "GPT Boot (uEFI permitted) is reinforced in BESR but limited to non-bootable partition backup and restore only" it does not explain if the newer SSR model will continue to work precisely or not. Infostream will undoubtedly be doing further testing at some point in-a lab setting to verify. Acronis's service page is quite obscure as well, so at this moment I can not confirm whether it operates or not; possible future assessment will confirm this as well.As often, in case you have any concerns, please feel free to contact us here at InfoStream, we'll be pleased to remedy any questions.Javier Trilla, MCSA, MCTSInfostream Network Engineer