## About Logical Storage Elements

Consider the following logical storage elements before you decide how to distribute data across the available physical storage and map it to data hosts:

- Storage pools are collections of similar virtual disks. Each pool has a profile that specifies a set of attributes.
- Virtual disks, also called RAID sets, are not physical disks. A virtual disk is a collection of locations in the memory of more than one physical disk. The storage array handles a virtual disk as if it were an actual disk.
- Volumes are divisions of a pool, consisting of virtual disks, and are assigned to initiators in the storage domain.
- Volume snapshots are copies of the data in a volume at a specific moment. The copies can be made without interrupting the normal operation of the system.

### Related Topics

- About Provisioning Storage
- About Physical Storage Elements
- About Storage Pools
- About Volumes
- About Virtual Disks