Logical Unit Number

In computer storage, a logical unit number, or LUN, is a number used to identify a logical unit, which is a device addressed by the SCSI protocol or Storage Area Network protocols which encapsulate SCSI, such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI.

A LUN may be used with any device which supports read/write operations, such as a tape drive, but is most often used to refer to a logical disk as created on a SAN. Though not technically correct, the term "LUN" is often also used to refer to the logical disk itself.

To provide a practical example, a typical multi-disk drive has multiple physical SCSI ports, each with one SCSI target address assigned. An administrator may format the disk array as a RAID and then partition this RAID into several separate storage-volumes. To represent each volume, a SCSI target is configured to provide a logical unit. Each SCSI target may provide multiple logical units and thus represent multiple volumes, but this does not mean that those volumes are concatenated. The computer that accesses a volume on the disk array identifies which volume to read or write with the LUN of the associated logical unit.

In another example: a single disk-drive has one physical SCSI port. It usually provides just a single target, which in turn usually provides just a single logical unit whose LUN is zero. This logical unit represents the entire storage of the disk drive.

How to select a LUN: In the early versions of SCSI, an initiator delivers a Command Descriptor Block (CDB) to a target (physical unit) and within the CDB is a 3-bit LUN field to identify the logical unit within the target. In current SCSI, the initiator delivers the CDB to a particular logical unit, so the LUN appears in the transport layer data structures and not in the CDB.

LUN vs. SCSI Device ID: The LUN is not the only way to identify a logical unit. There is also the SCSI Device ID, which identifies a logical unit uniquely in the world. Labels or serial numbers stored in a logical unit's storage volume often serve to identify the logical unit. However, the LUN is the only way for an initiator to address a command to a particular logical unit, so initiators often create, via a discovery process, a mapping table of LUN to other identifiers.

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