How to extend or grow a volume?

[chrisk110]

I am looking for info on how to expand/grow a nimble array volume?  I have a CS500 that has 4 volumes created on it.  I have one volume that has critical production VM's running on it and is under 700Gb of space free.  I have quite a few terabytes of space free that has not been committed to any of the existing volumes.  My question is can the volume be expanded/extended/grown while the production workloads are still running?

[mamatadesaiNim]

Hello Chris,

What hosts do you have, connecting to these 4 volumes?  Is this a VMware environment, and do you have our Nimble vCenter Plugin installed on the vCenter?

Thanks,

Mamata

[pbitpro96]

Yes, the volumes can be extended during production hours.  For more details, tell us what hypervisor you are using and how it is configured.

[chrisk110]

HI Mamata,

I have 3 Vsphere 6.0x host connected to the array's volumes with vcentre 6.x appliance running which has the nimble plugin installed but I have never had to use it.

[chrisk110]

HI Paul,

See other reply to answer your question.

[jharris-itguy16 · Accepted solution]

To increase the size of a VMware datastore and Nimble volume using the Nimble vCetner plugin follow these steps:

1. Find the volume under storage in your vCenter client
2. Right click the volume and go to the 'Nimble Storage Actions' option
3. Choose the 'Grow Datastore' Option

1. Enter the new size of your datastore/volume
2. Click the 'Grow Datastore' button

1. Watch the task complete as the volume and datastore increase in size

[mamatadesaiNim]

Chris, thank you.  I am guessing these are VMFS5 volumes then.  Context menu for the datastore should bring up "Nimble Storage Actions" --> Grow Datastore.  Could you please give that a try?

If you do not see the menu, please go to the datastore --> Actions -->

Also, Home --> Administration --> Client Plug-Ins should show the Nimble Storage plugin.

Please let me know how that goes.

Thanks,

Mamata

[dbauder92]

Not sure if you have resolved this issue by now.  I'm guessing you know how to increase the size of the Nimble volume by editing the volume then from the size tab you, well add more space.  From vSphere 6 you can use this procedure from VMware to increase the datastore size.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.hostclient.doc/GUID-B0D89816-02E5-4C42-AAFC-19751800A284.html

As a final step I always have each of the hosts rescan storage to make sure they are al up to date and in sync with each other.

[mamatadesaiNim]

Thanks Dan for that link.  Please note though: this will add an EXTENT to the existing VMFS datastore, which means you need to go out to the storage array, create another volume, add ACLs to it, make it visible to the ESXi host or ESXi hosts if you have multiple in a cluster.  This procedure can also grow the existing VMFS datastore, but only within the current EXTENT and usually customers create VMFS filesystems to occupy the entire extent at the first deployment.

The advantage of using the Nimble vCenter Plugin is: (a) it works with our storage system to actually grow the device size, and then increases the VMFS filesystem, so it's only one device, no more extents.  (b) for a cluster of ESXi hosts, you do not have to script this out, the plugin will handle it for all hosts in a cluster.  Voila!

[jkoss122]

We are using VCenter 5.5 and our storage arrays are on v2.3.14.0-325711-opt-- does the Grow datastore button on the VCenter Extension work without system impact for this version as well? 

[mamatadesaiNim]

Yes