The VIO-4008 appliance creates virtual I/O adapters and shares them with connected servers. Hence servers do not need any physical I/O adapters in them. Also, instead of booting from hard disks within the server enclosure, servers can use storage devices consolidated within a VIO-4008 appliance. The VIO-4008 appliance supports up to 8 SAS/SATA 3.5" hot plug disk drives and two RAID adapters. By using the Virtensys VMS management software, the user subdivides the local disks in the VIO-4008 into virtual disks. The virtual disks can then be allocated to each server through the virtual RAID HBA. The server accesses the virtual disks through the virtual RAID HBA as it would with physical disks and physical RAID adapter.