Expanding disk array MSA1000 W2K3-SVR-EE

[Richard Roth]

Hi,

We have a DL380G3 package cluster with a MSA 1000 enclouser attached.
The MSA holds 8x73GB U320 disk, configured with a RAID5 and has 7 created logical volumes within the array.

Due lack of diskspace we must add more drives to the array. We have bought 4 more disks (same size and model) and the plan is to first expand the disk array and then extend the logical volumes through the ACU.

My two questions are:

1. when checking the two DL380G3 servers neither of them have the ACU for the HP smart array configuration utility installed. How should we be able to install and run the ACU to configure the MSA correctly in this environment?

2. When we have expanded the aray and extended the logical volumes within ACU we want the new disk space to be available in disk manager in windows 2003 server EE. When using the diskpart utility we are only able to extend the last created logical disk volume in disk manager (in this case nr 7).

what are the recommendations/solutions to use allowing us extending the other 6 logical drives/volumes (disk 1-6) without need of recreating the volumes in disk manager?

Any help, hints and recommendations are very appreciated!

Regards,
Richard

[Steven Clementi]

Richard:

1. You should be able to simply install the latest available ACU for your server. If you ever installed a Proliant Support Pack, you should already have ACU.


Look here for latest version...

" http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/23361.html "

2. You should be able to extend each logical drive using the ACU and then extend each Partition in Windows using diskpart. I am not sure why you think you can not extend the other logical drives. They are all separate entities capable of being effected individually on their own, or all at once (if you make changes to the array settings).


Steven

[Richard Roth]

Thanks for your reply and answer Steven, I appreciate it very much.

My concern regarding the first question is that the ACU doesn't seem to be have been correctly installed on the servers since, when i run it, it displays an empty web page saying cannot find webpage. And when i try to run the SIM through https://myserver:2301 I'm able logon but have no options for the smart array ACU. I'm running a packaged MSA1000 cluster with two DL380G3 w2k3 EE servers shouldn't I install applications on servers like the ACU in a special way? I have allready prepared with the latest version download of the ACU.

My second question is based on the fact that I have heard and seen information (from MS and others) that you can only add new free diskspace to the next contigous disk space on a logical disk volume/ partion. And that logical disks based on one disk array (in this case a RAID5) should be treated as one physical disk, and therefore in windows, when using diskpart we only would be able to extend the last logical disk, in my case nr 7.
I also think this sounds weird and I'm glad to hear that this isn't the really true.

After I got some more information about the "best practise" regarding ACU installation on the clustered servers, I will do an expand/extend of the array/logical disks this weekend and then extend the logical volumes in windows using diskpart.

Regards,
Richard