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VSA and Disk size?

 
Chad Glidden
Occasional Contributor

VSA and Disk size?

I have a VSA on VMware 4.1u1.  It was created with 5 256Gb drives on virtual raid.  I have 1.22Tb of usable space, with all but 130Gb free now.  I can increase the size of the disks in Vmawre, but I do not seem to have the VSA  using the additional space.  For example now I have the drives increased to 300Gb, it shows Raw space of 1.46GB of space, but I still only have usable for 1.22Tb.

 

Am I missing something to increase the usable space on the VSA?  Or do I have to remove all the VSA drives, and start from scratch with disk space?

 

3 REPLIES 3
Steve Burkett
Valued Contributor

Re: VSA and Disk size?

Yup, that's pretty much it it seems. Remove the VSA from the management group, power off the VSA, remove the disk, add it back in, power on, configure RAID, add back to the management group, repeat for the rest.

 

Check out page 28 on the P4000 VSA Installation and Configuration Guide, under heading 'Changing the disk size on the SAN' .

 

ajamil786
Frequent Advisor

Re: VSA and Disk size?

You cannot change disks while VSA is part of a cluster or management group. Also make sure you are removing\adding disk on controller 1:0.

RonsDavis
Frequent Advisor

Re: VSA and Disk size?

Generally speaking you can change the disk sizes, then repair the node. Taking it out first, then putting it back in means two restripes, as opposed to just one.

Also my testing has shown on the VSAs, the VSA interal RAID is a span, not a stripe. So it will mostly fill the first virtual disk, then move on to the second, and so forth.

You should therefore probably just assign it one big RAID volume, instead of 5 smaller volumes, since it will do no RAID to those volumes anyway.

Mind you, this is based on what I've seen building out VSAs with 40 disks each. HP has not told me what the RAID the VSA does is. I've built them though, and watched the nodes populate each backing RAID volume one at a time. Meaning the VSA is not spreading disk access out across its virtual disks.