Expanding diskgroup

[Filip_ri]

Hello guys, i need a little bit of a guidance/best practice. The company I work for has MSA2040 has 2 disk groups, collegue that worked before me made 1 disk group with 12 disk and other one with 4 disks because customer didnt have enough money to buy all disks at once when he did configuration.

  Customer purchased the rest of disk few days back, and i want to remake second disk group.

I spent some time reading the refference guide but I just want to make sure Iam on the right track:

When i delete second disk group - data from it will automatically drain to first disk group if there is enough space (vdrain), after that i should just recreate second disk group and add it to pool?

[Shawn_K · Accepted solution]

Hello Filip,

Consider your options.

Option 1: Add the new drives and create a third disk-group which you can then add to a volume to expand the volume size. This offers you the option of adding space without deleting a disk-group causing a vdraim operation.

Option 2: You can delete the disk-group and allow the vdrain (or moved) operation to occur. Before taking this step be sure you have enough space to allow all the data in the smaller disk-group to be moved into the larger disk-group. Until the data has completed the move you will not be able to delete the smaller disk-group. So timing may be a key factor. Plan to do this activity during a time of little or no host IO so that the drain operation has top priority and can occur quickly. This will better protect your system while the drain operation is in process. Once the drain has completed you can create a new disk-group with your new drives.

Option 3: Backup all data and delete the pool. Then recreate the disk-group(s) with the correct number of drives and restore your data from backup. This option would allow you to set up multiple pools to utilize both controllers.

I would also suggest making sure your array is healthy and all disk-groups are fault tolerant before any action is taken. I also am a strong supporter of backups when performing these kinds of activites.

Good luck!

Cheers,
Shawn

I work for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The comments in this post are my own and do not represent an official reply from HPE. No warranty or guarantees of any kind are expressed in my reply.

[giladzzz]

hi

from your description I understand you have one pool and two virtual disk groups

if you delete one disk group consider creating a new pool and puting the new disk group in it

in this way you can load balance one pool a controller A and the other on controller B

Regards

Give a KUDO if this helps

[Filip_ri]

Thanks alot for your reply Ill consider my options in next few days and prolly do the migration next weekend.

Ill let you know how everything went.

Thank you once more, Cheers!