MSA1500cs HDD upgrade?

[Lesley Persyn]

Current situation:msa1500cs with msa30 and 10x74gbR6 (600Mb) (Esx)

New situation: more storage... need 1.2Tb :)

How should i implement this upgrade?
Add 4x 300gb disks stripe, copy all from the 74's and rearrange the 300's to the beginning of the msa30 (74's removed :) and expand with 2 more 300gb's? -> Raid 6 or any other suggestions? (10x 300Gb, changing every drive and rebuilding... is not an option and we want a clean array, one LUN)

It can be done offline...

Thanks,
Lesley.

[Martin Smoral]

I believe the max Logical size on a MSA is 2TB, so you could only use 8x300 drives in a R5 and still get a single 2TB LUN without wasting a lot of space. I think R6 is overkill for only 6 drives, it is recomended with 14 or more drives in a array. I would do as you noted above, start with 4 drives in a R5 copy the data over. delete the old 74GB arrray and remove all the drives. Then either expand the array with as many drives as you can afford and keep one 300gb disk to use as a hot spare. then expand the logical (up to 2TB, you will need to know how and if you can extend the lun within ESX though. Or you might want to create a 2nd Logical for your new VM's either on the expanded array or on a new array.