MSA1000 Expansion of the Array - require reboot?

[Paul_637]

I'm looking to add 3 disks to a 5-disk array containing a single RAID-5 logical drive to increase performance (spindles) rather than space.

MSA is hosting exchange Information Store storage for a two node cluster on Win2k3/Exchange 2003.

Someone has piped up & claimed that they "tried to do this before but it said it'd require a reboot so they had to cancel it because a reboot hadn't been planned for".

Personally I think this is likely rubbish (or he was doing something completely wrong!).

One of the selling points for extension/expansion of the MSA is "Online capacity expansion".

I've done this before, albeit a few years ago now, on similar kit. Surely the MSA is lower-level than the OS is aware of and so it doesn't make sense to claim a reboot required?

I know there are some restrictions due to ACU version etc. (such as maximum size of logical drives etc.) but again, it shouldn't affect the OS as such, just limitations in what changes you can make?

ACU is 7.85.18.0, Server 2003 Enterprise SP1

Am I right?

[Víctor Cespón · Accepted solution]

Adding disks to a RAID (expanding) and increasing the size of a logical drive (extending) can be done online.

Another question is the operating system and whether it's capable of recognizing the size change and extend it's filesystem.
Maybe that's what needed a reboot in that case.

The RAID expansion and rebuilding on a MSA1000 is done whenever the MSA is powered on, it does not need a server reboot or even a server to be connected to the MSA.

[Paul_637]

Thanks, I was pretty sure I was right!