P400 add disk capacity

[David Heiert]

According to the manual, it should be possible to change out disks in an array 1 at a time and increase the capacity.
I did this on our DL360 G5 using RAID 5 on our P400 but I do not see any place to add a volume or increase the capacity in any way.

I replaced the 72Gb drives with 146Gb one at a time. All of the VM's on it seem fine, but I see no way to increase the RAID colume size.

I assume I have to remove the old volume and add another?

[TTr]

> but I see no way to increase the RAID colume size

Are you doing this in the ACU? You should see the increase of the disk space already.

[David Heiert]

I have not tried ACU since I have ESXi on the machine. I suppose I could boot to the smart start, but that would mean taking the VM's down again.

[TTr]

All array disk management is done via either the ACU or the bios array management. The smartstart CD will give you that as well. Adding space is a multistep process. You have done the first step so far and have disk space available in the array group. The next step is to allocate the space within the array. Either you extend the existing LUNs or create new ones. Be careful if you extend the existing LUNs, verify that the ESX operating system can handle the "dynamic LUN expansion". Otherwise you allocate the new space by creating more LUNs.

[TTr]

Some people claim that ACU will work in ESX. There are some version restrictions. Do a google search for ACU VMWARE or check this one. http://communities.vmware.com/message/172695

[David Heiert]

I guess I neglected to mention that I already tried creating a new volume via the P400 BIOS utility and it tells me there is no new physical drive space available.
The existing volume was created using all of the space on the 4 X 72Gb drives that were originally in the machine.

[marsh_1]

hi,

as a last resort if you can't get it to pick up the extra space you could back it up (if you have'nt already) delete the array and recreate it then restore data.

hth

[marsh_1]

hi,

taken from the configuring arrays on hp smart array reference guide :-

NOTE: The Expand Array task is listed only if there is an unassigned physical drive on the
controller.

[David Heiert]

Thanks, Mark.

I guess I will have to create a new volume, which is a pain since I have production VM's on there.

And what is the point of "dynamic expansion" if you have to have an unused physical disk in the box? Then I would just use it...