adding extra shelf of disk to EVA4400

[Jeremy L.]

Hi,

I am adding an extra shelf of disks to my EVA4400. Right now I am planning on adding 10 additional 1TB drives. I currently have 12 1TB disks configured in my current setup with Single Sparing and 2 disk groups: a 7TB RAID 5 array and a 200GB RAID 5 array.

I am hoping that I can simply install the shelf of new disks and add them to the 7TB disk group. My question is whether I will lose any of the new space to additional sparing and, more importantly, if I can even add 10TB to the existing 7TB RAID 5 array.

Does anyone have an experience with an upgrade like this?

Thanks

[Greybeard]

hi, there is some confusing info in your post, are you saying you have a 7TB Disk Group or that you are running a 7TB VDISK? There are no RAIDs in an EVA. you can add the new disks to a disk group and since they are all the same capacity the protection will be unchanged (Single = 2xdisk capacity per GROUP) a disk group uses psegs and RSSs to organise the Vdisks across ALL the disks in a disk group, Vraid is not the same as group protection. For best performance use a single disk group so your Vdisks span as many physical disk a possibble.

[Jeremy L.]

Yes, my mistake, I have a 7TB vdisk and and a 200GB vdisk both with vraid5 redundancy. Both vdisks are in the same disk group.

So it sound like I can just add the 10 new disks to the existing disk group. Great! I assume I'll have to jump through a few hoops to get Windows to see the extra space though?

[Greybeard]

Whew, you had me worried there ;-)
If you've managed to get Windows to see a 7TB disk then adding another shouldn't be a problem, though I'm still inclined to stick to the 2TB vdisk limit as the larger ones have had quite a few "issues" with the various 4400 code revisions this year.
You can always use windows to stitch them together but that must be a pretty big data set if you need a LUN bigger than 7TB, hope it's a beefy server.

[Jeremy L.]

The server is being used for storage, with the desired outcome being a large drive mapped through group policy in Active Directory to a single shared drive.

The goal is to have the bulk of the space presented to Windows as a single large drive. I've had no problems with the 7TB vdisk so far but I am slightly concerned about the addition of 10TB more. At the same time 5 combined 2TB luns seems clumsy to me.

[Uwe Zessin]

I have a dim memory that vdisk expansion - as well as some other operations - are currently not possible on vdisks larger than 2TB.

[Mark...]

Hi,
Uwe is correct.
I have just tried to extend a vdisk larger than 2TB and it did not (currently) work. You are not able to do snapshots, snapclones or mirrorclones either if the Vdisk is larger than 2TB.
EVA4400 with 09501000 code and CV9.1.
Mark...

[Jeremy L.]

I currently have a 7TB vdisk (image attached) on version 09501100.

[Uwe Zessin]

Yes, but what is your point? I think nobody said you could not create one. The problem is that you cannot expand it any further with the current version of the controller firmware.

[Jeremy L.]

I think I misread what you were suggesting earlier. I thought that you meant that a vdisk couldn't be created larger that 2TB, but I understand now that what you are saying is that regardless of its original size, a vdisk can't be extended by anything more that 2TB. Right?

Thank goodness it's Friday!