Adding New Disks

[Marie H. Saldana]

I have a K250 that needs more disk space, but does not have any open disk slots in the storage racks. I believe there are two choices, one is to add an additional storage rack or my choice is to swap out 2/4mg drives for 2/9mg. I have the disks mirrored. Is this possible and how is it done?

[Eddie Warren]

I am assuming the two 4gb drives are internal to the K250. It is possible to change out the two 4gb drives. One option would be to reduce the logical volumes and remove the mirror. For example.

lvreduce -m 0 /dev/vg01/lvol4 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0

You would have to do this to all the logical volumes assigned to the 4gb drives. Once this is done the system can be shut down to remove the drive, i.e. (/dev/dsk/c1t0d0). Reinstall new 9gb drive.
Once the system is back up, you can create a new volume group on the new 9gb drive. Copy
all data from the 4gb to the new 9gb.
Once this is done you can shutdown the system
and remove the final 4gb drive and install the 2nd 9gb drive. When the system is back up, you can vgextend the volume group for the new 9gb drive and remirror.

Just make sure you do a good backup.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

See this recent thread:

http://my1.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x31950559ff7cd4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

...JRF...

[John Palmer]

Hi Marie,

Yes it's possible but you'll almost certainly have to create a new volume group for the 9Gb disks. This is due to the default setting for Max PE per PV being set to 1016 - enough for a 4Gb disk.

See this thread for more information:-

http://my1.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x2a517e990647d4118fee0090279cd0f9,00.html

I've done this in the past though and the procedure that I adopted to replace a mirrored pair of 4Gb disks for a pair of 9Gb (hot swap Jamaica disks) was as follows:-

1) lvreduce all your volumes to free up one of the 4Gb disks.
2) vgreduce the disk from the VG
3) Physically swap out the 4Gb and insert the 9Gb disk.
4) Create a new volume group consisting of the 9Gb disk.
5) Create new logical volumes and filesystems for all the existing ones on the 4Gb disk (resized if necessary).
6) Ensure that no applications are using your existing volumes.
7) Mount your new volumes at tempoary mount points and use find/cpio to copy the existing filesystems to the new ones. If you are using raw volumes then just copy the old ones to the new with dd.
8) Unmount the old filesystems (and the temporary ones), edit /etc/fstab and mount the new filesystems in place of the old ones.
9) Remove the remaining 4Gb disk and its volume group from the system. vgchange -a n vg?? and export vg?? is the quickest method.
10) Physically swap the remaining 4Gb disk for the 9Gb.
11) vgextend the new 9Gb disk into your new volume group.
12) lvextend all your volumes to mirror them onto the new 9Gb disk.

That's it your done.

Regards,
John

[Eddie Warren]

I forgot to add, once the logical volumes are reduced on the 4gb drives. You want to remove the old mirror drive from the volume group.

Hope this helps.