HP MSA2000 additional hard disks

[Lonescientist]

I have a HP MSA2000i storage enclosure which currently has 5 1TB SAS drives configured in a raid 5 array which serves our Vmware enviroment providing 4TB of space.

In order to increase available space I have purchased two additional identical disks and want to add them to the enclosure.

Do i need to power down the MSA enclosure to add these additional disks or can i add them whilst the MSA is running? This might seem like a daft question but a power down would mean shutting down the entire infrfastructure.

Many thanks

[Torsten.]

Arrays in general don't like offline changes, so yes, insert the disks while the array is up and running. Then you can expand the existing vdisk.

[BhavnishK]

Hi,

You can insert the drives into the MSA slot while it is up and running. Add single drive wait for a minute or 2 then insert 2nd drive. Once you see both drives have been spinned up, then you are ready to expand the Vdisk.

From MSA2000 Ref Guide:

Expanding Virtual Disk Capacity (Page 74)
You can expand the capacity of a virtual disk by adding drives to it. Because virtual
disk expansion does not require I/O to be quiesced, the virtual disk can continue to
be used while the Expand utility runs. Expanding a virtual disk adds free space after
the space used by existing volumes. You can then create or expand a volume to use
the free space. You can expand only one virtual disk at a time.
The RAID level determines how the virtual disk can be expanded and the maximum
number of drives the virtual disk can have, as shown in the following table.

Have attached the ref guide for you.

Thanks,

BK

[Johan Guldmyr]

You probably want to know that doing these expansions will take quite a long time (will take days, probably weeks). There are other posts on this forum on that topic.

You may also want to contemplate if a 7 drive RAID5 is a risk you are willing to take.