MSA 2040 Phyisical Disk Move

[DylanArmstrong]

Hello expert.

We are planning to increase our storage on an MSA2040.  Currently the disks are split between the MSA 2040 and a D2700. To increase the storage we are thinking about executing the following:

1. Attach a new D2700 chasis to the SAN.

2. Move the disks from the MSA2040 to the new D2700.

3. Populate the MSA 2040 with new disks and create new storage.

4. Move virtual machines to new storage.

Can anyone see any potential issues with this approach? What will happen to the disk groups? both linear and virtual.

Any help much appreacaited.

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1 · Accepted solution]

I understand you have MSA2040 along with D2700 attached as drive enclosure. You want to add another D2700 after the existing D2700. Then want to move all existing drives from Controller Enclosure to new D2700. Then want to populate new drives in Controller Enclosure.

Regarding VM movement, purely depends on Host. You must be having VMWare and you want to use option V-Motion to move VMs. That shouldn't be a challange.

All Vdisk or Disk Group information stored in every drive metadata so even if you move drive from one location to another location Vdisk or Disk Group information should be intact.

One doubt I have in order to increase Storage space why you want to move drives from Controller Enclosure to D2700 and then want to populate Controller Enclosure with new drives. You could have populate new drives in new D2700 and create new Virtual Disk Group and add it to pool to increase storage space in case of Virtual Storage. Also you can add drives with existing vdisks to increase it's storage space in case of Linear Storage.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

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[DylanArmstrong]

Thanks Subhajit for confirming we can move the disks. It's actullay a bit of an infrastructure refresh, and the new D2700 will be added to the SAN temporarilty just to move disks, so that we can put new disks in the enclosure, it will then be moved to our other datacenter to increase storage on another MSA 2040.

Regards, Dylan.

[Shawn_K]

Hello,

As Subhajit has stated - either adding drives to the D2700 or the controller enclosure should not be an issue. The only caution I would make is adding drives to a linear vdisk using expansion. This process takes a long time and while expansion is running you cannot do a rebuild. If you are going to expand a linear vdisk, I would recommend a backup first. Or to perform a backup, delete the vdisk, and recreate a new vdisk with the correct number of drives and restore from backup.

As you add disk-groups and vdisks, my recommendation is to balance across the controllers so you are using both controllers and all available host ports evenly. This will maximize your CPU usage on the controllers and provide you the best performance possible.

Cheers,

Shawn

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

Can you please help us to understand if the issue got resolved or not?

If issue got resolved then how?

Also request you to mark the forum as resolved if there is no more outstanding query from your end on this issue.

This will help for everyone who are all following your forum.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

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

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[DylanArmstrong]

Hi Subhajit, we haven't recieved the new kit yet, but you have answered my question so I shall mark it as resolved.

Thanks,