Online logical drive extension with Linux

[toomas_aas]

Hello!

I have a SuSE Enterprise 9 server with one big data partition on a RAID5 array on Smart Array 5302 controller (the operating system itself lives on another array, another controller). I need to increase the size of this partition, which is currently on ext3 filesystem.

The array currently consists of 4x72GB physical drives. I have added two more identical drives to the array. Next, I plan to extend the logical drive with hpacucli:

ctrl slot=1 ld=1 modify size=max

However, there's one thing I'm not sure about here. The HP reference guide warns that "If the operating system does not support logical drive extension, carrying out this command would make
data on the logical drive unavailable."

I'm not sure whether HP considers SLES9 with ext3 fs as "supporting logical drive extension". I do know that ext3 filesystem itself can be extended with resize2fs, but I think HP means something different by "support" here. How can I find out without trying whether extending the logical drive will destroy my data partition?

[toomas_aas]

Well, Google finally relented on me and turned up something relevant. Unfortunately, the answer doesn't look good:

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Not all operating systems support online logical drive extension through the ACU.

Windows, NetWare, and other advanced operating systems support volume and logical drive extension, which enables you to add additional drives to an existing RAID set and extend the logical drive so that it displays as free space at the end of the same drive presented to the operating system.

Linux only supports volume and logical drive extension at the operating system level. It is not supported through the logical drive extension on the array controller.

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So it seems that on Linux I need to create another logical drive and then use LVM to present them to the OS as single volume. I also found out that Linux is not considered "advanced operating system" :)

Link to full article: http://www.phptr.com/articles/article.asp?p=359414&seqNum=3&rl=1

[Ciro Iriarte]

Thanks a lot for the update, i'm on the same situation now, it would be nicer to have just one logical drive, but if a second logical drive is the only solutions....

[Ciro Iriarte]

Well, seems it can be done according to a page i found:

"start hpacucli and ready through the help.
its pretty easy.
i used it to add 2 disk to an array.
then extended the logical to full size of the array.
if done this while the system was still running and in normal use.
this took quite some time, but worked very well.
after this i bootet with a rescuedisk and used fdisk and resizefs to extend the partitions."

Link:http://debian.catsanddogs.com/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,41/action,printpage/topic,10.0/