topic Hyper-V 2012 R2 CSV and Nimble in Array Performance and Data Protection

Hyper-V 2012 R2 CSV and Nimble

kwanderski2 — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 16:02:35 GMT

Hello all,

A while back I created a new CSV volume in our Hyper-V cluster to start migrating over some VM's from our older, slower SAN and everything has been working great. I noticed today that Solarwinds Virtualization Manger was notifying me that I had over provisioned the CSV volume by 130%. Since I have plenty of space available I went ahead and extended the CSV volume in Nimble by 500 GB which of course took immediately. I then went to the CSV owner node and was able to verify that the extra free space was seen by Windows disk manager. I then went to expand the partition in disk manager and that's when things fell apart. Once I clicked to extend the partition, It completely knocked that entire CSV offline and I lost all my VM's that were on that volume. After troubleshooting I was able to get all 5 hosts reconnected to Nimble and the CSV volume online and then was able to boot up the guest VM's and get everything back to normal, but I'm a bit concerned that expanding the volume size would completely knock it offline since I have never had an issue doing this before on my other CSV's (non Nimble storage)

So my questions are:

1. has anyone else ever experienced this?

2. Is there some sort of different procedure that needs to be followed when expanding a Nimble hosted CSV?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Re: Hyper-V 2012 R2 CSV and Nimble

rugby0134 — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 17:23:43 GMT

What code level are you running and did you open a support case? This shouldn't have happened.

Re: Hyper-V 2012 R2 CSV and Nimble

kwanderski2 — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 14:16:48 GMT

Running 2.1.7 and I did open a support case later that day. I have sent them cluster logs from each host and they think it could be a bug that caused it so they are investigating and I'm awaiting a call back.

Re: Hyper-V 2012 R2 CSV and Nimble

stevewysocki26 — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 18:50:41 GMT

I just experienced this with one of my volumes. I have a CSV that I resized and then refreshed it with disk manager. About a day later I lost the volume in the cluster (CSV) and if I tried to add it back in, it just showed up as a RAW disk. I had to open up a case with support. I will update when I hear back.

Re: Hyper-V 2012 R2 CSV and Nimble

stevewysocki26 — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 19:34:21 GMT

Well, it looks like I just did something stupid. I resized the volume from the volume editor and I shrunk it. Had I done this the other direction (using MS tools and then using the storage array config) it may have worked. Just word from the not so wize: do not resize down unless you have a backup! Luckily it was just my ISO files Anyway, the size of the volume is pretty much flexible (upward). The Nimble CS uses thin provisioning and will only use the disk space that is being used. This is similar to what Hyper-V does, but at the storage array level.

Keith, in your case, I would suggest you look at your SolarWinds VM manager software as this the Storage Array would have been completely agnostic in your case.