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Re: Vdisk expand - should it take ten days?

 
dba_jeff
Occasional Contributor

Vdisk expand - should it take ten days?

I have an MSA2312sa G2 with six 1TB SATA-FC drives and one RAID6 Vdisk. I have now added a seventh 1TB drive to the Vdisk and the MSA is in the process of incorporating it. Based on the progress so far (I'm at 39% complete), the entire expand process should take around ten days. There are no errors or warnings and the array is fully available to users, so there are no obvious problems occuring, but the length of time required seems a bit extreme. Is this normal based on your experience?

2 REPLIES 2
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Vdisk expand - should it take ten days?

Expand is a background activity, so it runs on lower priority and depends on the workload. For RAID6 it has to recalculate everything, this takes time.


Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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AnkitM
Trusted Contributor

Re: Vdisk expand - should it take ten days?

Expansion can take hours or days to complete, depending on the virtual disk RAID level and size, drive speed, utility priority, and other processes running on the storage system. Vdisk Expansion in Modular Smart Array (MSA) 2000 series is a slow process and its normal duration might be several days for small sized vdisk. For bigger vdisks, it can take up to several months. End-user can stop the expansion only by deleting the virtual disk. Before starting the expansion, make sure there is a valid backup of the data so that if it is needed to delete the virtual disk, end-user can move the data to a new, larger virtual disk.

 

However, Vdisk expansion can be controlled by utility priority. End-user can change the priority at which the Verify , Reconstruct , Expand , and Initialize utilities run when there are active I/O operations competing for the systemтАЩs controllers.

 

To change the Utility Priority in MSA 2000 G2 or P2000 G3 controllers:
In the Configuration View panel, right-click the system and select Configuration , Advanced Settings , System Utilities .
Set Utility Priority to either:
High
Medium
Low
Background: Utilities run only when the processor has idle cycles (not applicable for vdisk utilities and applicable only for scrub).
Click Apply


Priority value description :
High :
Use when the highest priority is to get the system back to a fully fault-tolerant state. This causes heavy I/O with the host to be slower than normal. This value is the default.
Medium :
Use when end-user wants to balance data streaming with data redundancy.
Low :
Use when streaming data without interruption, such as for a web server, is more important than data redundancy. This enables the Reconstruct or other utility to run at a slower rate with minimal effect on host I/O.

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