1. A provisioning apparatus operable with a virtualization layer in a server, for provisioning a storage volume associated with a physical storage device to a virtual server in a storage area network, the provisioning apparatus comprising: at least one computing device, including: a receiving component for receiving an instruction to create a storage volume on an attached storage device, the instruction comprising at least one requested characteristic of the attached storage device; a discovery component for transmitting a request to the virtualization layer to identify one or more storage devices having characteristics matching the characteristics requested in the received instruction; in response to identification of a storage device having matching characteristics, a communication component transmitting a request to the storage device to create a storage volume with the characteristics; a receiving component for receiving a first unique identifier associated with the created storage volume from the storage device; a discovery component for performing a discovery operation, by the virtualization layer, to determine one or more storage volumes that are visible to the virtualization layer and receiving from each of the one or more storage volumes a second unique identifier associated with the located storage volume; a comparing component for determining from configuration data associated with each located storage volume the second unique identifier associated with each located storage volume; a comparing component for comparing the first unique identifier received from the virtualization layer with each of the second unique identifiers associated with the configuration data to find a matching identifier; in response to a matching identifier being identified, a compare component performing a lookup in the configuration data for a physical volume identifier associated with the matching identifier; and an identification component for identifying from the configuration data an identical mapping between a first physical volume identifier and a second physical volume identifier received from the virtual server, in order to identify a corresponding mapping between the storage volume visible to the virtual server, the virtualization layer, and attached storage volume having the characteristics.