MSA 1040 - Adding disks to RAID10 Linear pool

[SteveGlynn]

Hello, hoping to find some help here, don't want to screw anything up.

I inherited an MSA1040 with a RAID10 linear pool of 6 disks with a dedicated spare.  Connected to this is are 2 virtual hosts running VMWare, currently running very low on storage.  I have 5 more disks that were purchased and never installed, and i'd like to add as much additional storage to this pool as possible.

If I attempt to modify the disk group, I can check the "Expand" box, and this is what comes up, and i'm unable to check any of the additional disks unless I choose "additional sub-groups" and can add them as RAID1-4 and 1-5 as shown here.

Is this the proper method to go about expanding this storage, without affecting my current production environment (other than slowing it down temporarily) that's connected to the array?  I don't want to expand this improperly and cause a major outage.  Any help is appreciated

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

I understand you have linear vdisk configured in RAID10 and you want to expand this with 5 more disks.

My suggestion would be not to try this because once vdisk expansion started then you can't stop it for any reason. Only option will be to delete the vdisk. Same information you can find in any SMU guide or best practice technical paper. Also this is time consuming.

https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA4-6892ENW (page no 41)

Instead of this faster approach will be to take data backup, unmap existing volumes, delete existing vdisks and volumes. Then re-create new vdisk with existing drives along with new 5 drives this time. Re-create volumes again and present them to hosts. Restore data from backup. This you can implement with one weekend itself but if you go for vdisk expansion that too with 5 drives it will take ages (may be couple of weeks or months) to complete. You have not mentioned how many drives vdisk this is or what is the size of this new 5 drives but main point vdisk expansion can take hours or days to complete, depending on the vdisk’s RAID level and size, disk speed, utility priority, and other processes running on the storage system.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

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[SteveGlynn]

Thank you for the information. I forgot to provide some details - 1.2TB 15K drives are in the system - Currently 6 of them with 1 spare in RAID10.  System is very full, though not often at high capacity.  Performance on controllers show a CPU load around 2-6, with 30KB/second usage.  VDISK performance is around 20 IOPS, 225KB/s.

While I  understand the ideal method would be to backup - delete - recreate - represent, I don't have the storage capacity to backup and create everything, otherwise I wouldn't have needed the extra disks.  New drives are same size/capacity

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

If you are aware of the consequences of vdisk expansion and you don't have option but to go for vdisk expansion only then you can refer same best practice guide and page no 40 having the table which shows RAID10 you can add 2 or 4 drives at a time.

https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA4-6892ENW (page no 40)

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

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[Ejust]

Hi,

We have raid 4 linear pool in our production environment which is currently running out of space. Am newbie in HP storage and having 5 new disks. 

Seeking for Advise on how can best approach the task without causing any downtime and data loss