Expanding Virtual Disk in HSG80/ Windows 2000

[Ryan Meyers]

I have a virtual disk with 6 18 Gb hard drives being used in a Microsoft Windows 2000 Cluster. I want to replace these disks with 36 gb drives to acquire new space. Can this be done and if so, what are the steps to accomplish this?

[Bostjan Kosi]

Hi,

you would need to do a full backup + restore...Do not forget in this case you are restoring cluster disks, so disk signatures are of most importance. Use clusrest urility + dumpcfg (available from MS).
also check KB articles or ITRC forums, I remember seeing some question on disk expansion (diskpart utility) for clustered disks also on forums...

br
B.

[Ryan Meyers]

I kind of got thrown into working on this project and really do not know much about how this works. Can you please give me some specific instructions on what needs to be done here or point me to someplace where i can get some specific steps to take. Any help you can give me is greatly appreciated.

[Steven Clementi]

Ryan:

I do not think you can expand an array on an HSG80 system the same way you can with a Smart Array. A different course of action my need to be required.

One way to do this would be to migrate to a new disk. How you ask? Easily...

First, if you have some spare drive slots in your HSG80 system, I would first install and configure the new drives. Afterwards, present them to one of the nodes of the cluster as if you were adding in new resources, make sure both nodes can see and access the new drive(s).

After that, and after disabling any clustered resources (SQL, Exchange, etc), I would copy the data over to the new drives from the old. Using the Cluster Recovery utility, you can replace your old drives with the newly created drives as if you "lost" your old drives and now needed to "recover" them.

Cluster Recovery Utility can be found here... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2be7ebf0-a408-4232-9353-64aafd65306d&DisplayLang=en

After you replace the drives, they should all have the same drive letters and configuration so your clustered apps should not complain. Read the help file with the utility. Do a FULL Backup before hand!

There are probably a few indepth details that I can go into, just unsure how indepth you need to get. Let us know.


Steven

[Uwe Zessin]

Remember that you need to erase the first disk blocks with DILX to get rid of this #$*%@ "EISA partition".

[Steven Clementi]

Uwe:

I could not find "#$*%@" in the dictionary... can you rephrase? ;o)

Steven

[Uwe Zessin]

That was a rethorical question, I hope. I really don't want to translate that as I might end up loosing my ITRC account ;-)

[SAKET_5]

Ryan,

Totally agreed with previous posts. But if you can afford to keep both the storage set (mirror/raid) built of 18GB disks and the new one that you build with 36GB disks, you can "concatenate" these two sets to provide you a bigger LUN at the HSG Layer. It is then just a matter of performing a "disk scan" under "diskmgmt.msc" and use Diskpart to grow your existing basic disk partition to reflect the increase in size of the underlying LUN.

We have performed concatset operations in the past with favourable outcomes. Remember that this is a once-off operation and members of a concatset cannot be deleted.

if you need more info, thats what ITRC is there for :)

[SAKET_5]

Uwe,

I have noticed that *#$%^EISA partition on HSG disks presented to Windows hosts:)

How and why does it get created, why do we need them, how to run DILX to get rid of them, is this operation destructive? Do you need to do it before setting up your partitions, e.g. Basic Disk 0 contains the first few blocks dedicated to this hidden EISA partition and then you have created your C:\, can you now run DILX to erase the EISA or its too late and it should be done before setting up any partition on that disk?

Thanks Uwe!

[Uwe Zessin]

They are created by the factory :-( and nobody _needs_ them. Most need to get rid of them!

I don't understand why the vendor delivers a disk with any meta data on it.

Here is a link to a customer advisory that gives some background information.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=PSD_OD010710_CW01