topic Re: XP and volume expansion in Disk Enclosures

XP and volume expansion

Amar_Joshi — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:24:29 GMT

Hello XP experts!

Does anyone know about non-disruptive volume expansion on XP disk arrays?

Thanks in advance.

Re: XP and volume expansion

IBaltay — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:48:19 GMT

Hi,
here is the HP support document for Windows, LUN (LUSE) capacity expansion.
the host mode is 2C, and e.g. for the Windows MSCS cluster (basic disks), the recommendation is to bring the disk resource offline, expand it with LUSE and then diskpart it on the host size....

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00313980&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Re: XP and volume expansion

Amar_Joshi — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:00:54 GMT

Thanks for pointing to the document Baltay,

I am looking for any future plans to include it in microcode to support the expansion for non-LUSE volumes. If anyone heard any whispering word about it?

Re: XP and volume expansion

IBaltay — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:11:09 GMT

Hi,
in Unix/Linux OS platform there is no real need for this, because they have LVM. Thus the LUNs can be nicely loadbalanced across all hardware paths from the host to the storage in smaller chunk. At the same the online extension is done via LVM on the host side:
e.g. in HP-UX it is valid for 11i v2, 11i v3:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01920387/c01920387.pdf (BSC link updated by admin)

Windows does not have the LVM (maybe Veritas LVM) and thus the only method of the expansion is LUSE

XP has also the new feature of Thin Provisioning which aims in the EVA disk pool conceipt with the back-end redistribution in the future.
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/tpsxp/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Re: XP and volume expansion

IBaltay — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:14:52 GMT

one additional,
the Thin Provisioning is the feature of the firmware 600 of the XP 24000

Re: XP and volume expansion

IBaltay — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:19:57 GMT

sorry, the link was bad so once more :-)
and here is the Thin Provisioning users guide:
http://bizsupport.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01554245/c01554245.pdf

Re: XP and volume expansion

Kevin Nikiforuk — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:53:04 GMT

Would anyone happen to know all the proper steps I would need to follow with my replication disk (CA/BC) when I expand a PVOL LUSE "dynamically"?

Thanks Bill

Re: XP and volume expansion

Amar_Joshi — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:38:13 GMT

You have to split the BC/CA pairs before you do that and recreate the pairs after expansion. Reason that CA/BC won't allow you to make any changes to PVOL/SVOL if VOLs are in any replication relationship. This rule is for AutoLUN too.

Re: XP and volume expansion

tore_3 — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:51:03 GMT

Hp support is able to expand thp volumes if there is space available direct after the configured thp volume. This is currently only supported on windows2003 and 2008.