Systems Management Server (SMS) is designed to work with any hardware that is certified on the Windows Hardware Compatibility List for Microsoft Windows NT and Microsoft Windows 2000-based computers. For more information about the Windows Hardware Compatibility List, view the following Microsoft Web site: Note, however, that SMS has not been tested with all hardware configurations that are listed on the HCL and you may experience issues with some configurations.

Storage Area Networks (SAN) configurations are fully supported by SMS, but have not been specifically tested with SMS. Microsoft supports placing SMS data stores on either direct-attached storage or on SAN-attached storage. Note that this is subject to a maximum limit of 4 terabytes (TB) for each volume.

Some storage vendors offer optional features such as additional mirrors, mirror splitting, or remote replication (synchronous or asynchronous). Microsoft has not tested SMS with these features and you should consult with your storage vendor to ensure compatibility and to prevent data loss. Microsoft provides commercially feasible support for using SMS with these optional features. In addition, where you use Microsoft SQL Server as the underlying data store, you must insure that any storage software or optional hardware feature is also compatible with SQL. If a problem occurs, you may need to reconfigure a site system to use storage that is not SAN-based to isolate and correct the problem.

You should consider all risks when you choose any configuration. Although no known problem with a SAN configuration and SMS has been reported, it is important to note that there is a reduced level of testing that has been performed by Microsoft with SMS in this configuration.