New drives for SureStore E Disk Array 12 H

[Jeffrey F. Goldsmith]

I currently have 8 9.1GB hard drives in my SureStore. I purchased 2 18.2GB hard drives and have installed them into my SureStore.

The question now is how do I setup the disks so I can use them?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Jeff:

Bear in mind you are only going to get at most about 25GB or so from these two drives. Your AutoRAID has to enough room to cover the loss of the largest single disk. In your case 18GB. The good news is that the previously reserved space was 9GB so you get that back. You really need to add another pair of disks to see large improvements. In any event, you need to use the arraycfg command to create a new LUN. You cannot expand an existing one. You then do a pcvreate on that new LUN. You then do a vgextend to add this LUN to a volume group. You can then do an lvextends to extend a logfical volume followed by an extendfs. You man man each of these commands for details. The easist method is to use SAM->Disks & Filesystems. It can do all of these operations for you. This will be especially easy if you have OnlineJFS because the filesystem expansion can be done Online.

SAM->Disks & FileSystems -> Disk Devices
Locate the AutoRAID Disk Controller and hilite it.
Actions -> Disk Array Maintenance -> Bind LUN

This will create a LUN of any desired size.

[Insu Kim]

There's nothing special to do if autoinclude option is enabled.
-If not, include newly added drives in SAM.
You can notice extra capacity by running "arraydsp -a ".

In the HP AutoRAID 12H document.
The array makes immediate use of the additional disk space, even before a new LUN is created, by increasing the RAID 0/1 space. The additional capacity can be made available to the operating system by creating a new LUN on-line without disrupting array operation.

When mixing disks of different capacities, at least two of the higher capacity disks must be included to utilize their entire capacity.
If a single higher capacity disk is included in the array, the full capacity will not be available for LUN creation.

It is also important to note that adding only one or two higher capacity disks to an array of smaller disks may not yield the
expected capacity.
When only two higher capacity disks are
added to the array, the upper segment created by the new larger disks will be used for the larger Active Hot Spare and parity requirements, giving little gain to available capacity.

Hope this helps,

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

you include them into the array:
use the control panel or sam (or arraycfg -d)
(and include them during off hours time, because the migration of data will take some io activity)

You then need to create a LUN to make use of the new capacity, arraycfg -l or sam or control pannel.

Your lun # will then appear as a device in class disk on an ioscan
you do the pvcreate, vgcreate/vgextend, and lvcreate/lvextend, newfs, mount to use the disk space (or use sam)

Later,
Bill