Expanding DL 380 G5 RAID 5 with ESXi

[Wasantha Gamage]

Hi All,
I have a DL380 G5 with 4x146GB drives in RAID 5 setup.Server is on ESXi with ESX installed on 2x72 G mirror and RAID 5 used as storage for the VMs.I have ran out of space on the RAID 5 storage and would like to add 2 more 146Gig hot swap drives.
I would like to find out if it is possible to have the 2 new drives added to the ARID 5 without wiping out the current files/VMs in the RAID.I believe i can use HP ACU as in the initial install.
Any feedback is much appreciated.

[TTr · Accepted solution]

Yes, adding drives to existing raid groups is standard practice. Ensure that you run a good backup before you start adding disks.

After you add the disks, the new space will show up as unallocated space in the existing raid5 group. You can then create new LUNs and use them for VMs. This is recommended for better i/o within the VMs.

You can also assign the space to the existing LUNs but this is a two step process. First you expand the existing LUNs within the raid controller and then you need to expand the volumes on each LUN within the OS. Not sure if ESX supports volume expansion.

Search in this forum for "online expansion" you will see that many people have done it.

[Wasantha Gamage]

Thank You, much appreciated. I will try this.