Adding more storage and memory to a Proliant DL380p Gen8 Server

[nermus]

Hello forum

I have a Proliant DL380p Gen8 server with 2 10K SAS 300GB SFF disks. The system is configured as RAID 1 and has 32GB of RAM.

The server is fronted with ESXi 5.0 and there is only 1 VM running Win Server 2K8R2 with 20GB RAM allocation and 265GB of space allocation (total 300GB in server after RAID 1). I cannot allocate more memory nor take snapshots because there isn't enough space in the disks . Consequently, I would like to do the following two upgrades:

1. Upgrade the RAM to 64GB

2. Upgrade the storage to 1.2TB (after RAID 1) by fitting another 6 10K SAS 300GB SFF disks.

1. For the RAM upgrade, I assume that it is fairly straight forward, since I will just fit another 4x8GB and have it available in ESXi without having to take further actions. Anybody willing to raise any concerns and/or feedback about this?

2. For the storage upgrade, I am a bit confused and hesitant since I am not really related with IT (tasks have been delegated because of lack of IT people). Would it be possible for someone to guide me through the upgrade while making sure that my current two discs are not re-imaged when the 6 new disks are fitted onto the server? Is data reservation taken care by default (if I do not change the RAID level of course) when new disks are fitted?

There will be a complete datastore backup of course before any attempt to add more disk space, but I would like to know whether adding more space is as easy as fitting the 6 new disks. Will existing data just replicate to the new discs (RAID 1)? After fitting the discs, will I need to configure anything through iLO considering that the server is already RAID 1? In the ESXi level, after fitting the disks, will I be able to expand the datastore or create a new one (should be able to see 900GB unallocated since the server will be 1.2TB after RAID 1)?

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Nermus

P.S. This thread has been moevd from Disk to ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL). - Hp Forum Moderator

[nermus]

Hello everyone

Anyone willing to share their expertise?

Nermus

[waaronb]

Once you install the new disks you'll need to use the array config utility to do something with those new disks.

If your plan is to grow your existing array, you add all the new disks to the array and then you would either expand the array, or maybe you want to move from RAID 1 to RAID 5 or 50?  Or create a new logical volume instead of expanding the original... it depends on what you want.

Expanding an existing logical volume still means you need to do something in the OS to extend the partition to use the new space.  It's easy in Windows, but I don't know how that's done in ESX.

[Andrew_Haak]

I eoild suggest to creste a new raid 5 set and create a new partition to store your data. You can leave your mirrorset for your OS and the new raid5 for the new data.