procedure for expanding vdisk

[Ed Stevens]

I'm sure this is a basic question, but we recently lost our SA, so I (dba) am having to pick up the slack.

I need to increase the size of a couple of the file systems on one of my HP-UX boxes. The fs in question is on our EVA SAN. Looking at StorageWorks Command View, it looks like - from the SAN end - it's a simple as changing the 'requested' size of the vdisk in question.

Am I tracking so far?

Second, it seems that before increaseing the vdisk allocation, I should (at the server) un-mount the fs, then mount it back after the work in Command View. Correct?

Besides the obvious backups before beginning, is there anything else I need to consider?.

[Sheldon Smith]

Hopefully, someone with a little more HP-UX knowledge will respond. You are at least partially right: From the SAN end, you can just increase the requested size of the vdisk. Once the vdisk is expanded, it is then up to the OS to understand what to do with the extra space. Some OS's file systems can be told to move the end of the partition / file system to the end of the disk. Others are not that smart. And I do not know if the HP-UX file system can be expanded.

From what I've seen in the past, with HP-UX, the disks were grouped in to one or more Logical Volume Groups, and then logical volumes were sliced from the volume group. It's been a few years since I saw all this, so HP-UX may be a lot smarter now.