Problems with expanding MSA1500?

[Schmidi76]

Hello,
I have a MSA 1500 with Firmware 5.10.
Well, currently I have 7 harddiscs as one array with Raid 6. Now I want to expand it with 7 harddiscs.
Is it so possible like clicking on expand array, choose my harddiscs and click on finish?
What problems could occur?

Best regards
Schmidi

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

the frist step is to expand the array. You should add the disks to the enclosure one by one. Give the MSA time to detect the drive until you add the next one. After that, start ACU and click on the array to which the RAID ADG logical drive belongs. In the right pane you should see a menu entry for the expansion. Click on it, mark the newly added disks and save the settings. The MSA will begin with the expansion. You should see a message in the ACU, on the LCD on the controllers and in the eventlog of the servers.

A possible problem is that one disk dies through the expansion process. But I never had such a situation. Depending on the expansion priority the process takes a long time.

Best regards,
Patrick

[Schmidi76]

Hello,
should I add all newly disks in one way or better disk by disk to the logical array?

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

you should add all disks at one time to the array.

Best regards,
Patrick

[Schmidi76]

Hi,
well, I added all disk drives to expand the array. Now I expanded the logical volume to max. capacity of 2 TB, the MSA dosen´t allow adding more space.
But what could I do with the left space? So I created a new logical volume, but I couldn´t see this volume on Windows 2003.
Any hints or tips?

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

you need to present this new logical drive to you host. Select SSP in ACU and mark the right HBA wo which the logical drive should be presented. After a rescan in the disk management MMC the disk should be appear.

Best regards,
Patrick

PS: Assign points for helpful answers.

[Schmidi76]

Hi,
works fine. Thank you for your help :)

[Schmidi76]

Thanks to Patrick Terlisten, he explained all steps very good :)