Methods facilitating management of shared volumes of logical storage, residing on one or more disks in a shared storage system, are accessible by multiple computers. A coherent view of the shared storage is provided by assigning unique identifiers to each managed disk, physical partition, partition set, and volume; and by describing a volume as a logical tree of partitions; when computer needs to modify a volume configuration it temporarily disables all computers' access to the modified shared disks and performs the changes. Efficient shared volume input/output handling is provided by minimizing number of requests directed toward each storage unit using page aligned buffers and transfer offsets. Per computer and per user access control is provided by storing a security descriptor for each shared volume, when user or computer access has to be enforced the security identifier of the user or machine is checked against the security descriptor for needed rights.