Disk grow dynamically?

[josemaria cr]

How can add new volumes in MA8000 with MS-cluster and Secure Path?
Is HP OpenView Storage Volume Growth the best solution?
The key is to have always one disk (not bigger than 1GB) and add new disks as the system needs it along the time.

Regards,
jmc

[Uwe Zessin]

josemaria,

I thought that Storage Volume Growth is used to update partition sizes when the underlying LUN has been expanded on the storage array. It is not a volume manager.

It sounds like you want to provide incremental growth to you servers, but it cannot be done that way with an MA8000. You can only slice a container in up to 8 partitions - if you have a 72 GByte disk that would mean 8 units with about 9 Gigabytes each (the size is specified in percent).

The only way to grow an existing unit is through the use of a 'concat-set'. If I recall correctly, you can only connect 2 RAID-5 sets together, so the expansion is a one-time operation and it is incompatible with partitions.

There is also a maximum LUN limit with Secure Path. It is at least 64 LUNs, but 64 x 1 Gigbyte is not that much.