EVA4400 reduce vdisk size

[dfortunati]

Hi,

I need to reduce the size of a vdisk which is actually used by a Windows 2008 R2 + SQL 2008 server.

I can't create a new vdisk because there's no more space available on the storage.

How can I do it without destroying data?

Thanks,

Daniele

[ranjitha_kothur]

Hi Daniele,

reducing the VDISK in EVA is not advisable

Thanks

Ranjitha

[linarvz]

Hi Daniele,

while it's technically possible to reduce a VDISK size in EVA, you should consider how this change will affect upper levels, i.e. file system level and database file structures.

Shrinking a LUN would simply cut off the highest LBA address range, so to shrink a volume safely the following needs to be confirmed:

1. There must be enough free space on the volume;

2. File system needs to be defragmented so that all free blocks are moved to the end of the volume;

3. NTFS volume need to be shrunk.

Only when there is free space at the end of the LUN which doesn't belong to a partition can the LUN itself be shrunk, and extreme care needs to be taken to ensure the new reduced VDISK size is still large enough to accommodate all the existing partitions.

Depending on data set size, backing up/restoring data could be a better option.

Hope this helps,

Linar