Expanding a lvol striped across 10 disks

[S.Rider]

HPUX 11.11, I inhierated a 116gb lvol that was created a year ago and is striped across 10 disks. It has filled up and I need to expand it. I think the only option to expand it in place, is to get another 10 disks to stripe it across. Is there a way to cheat around this ?
if only they had striped it across the first 5 disks, and then a second set of 5 disks, my task would be alot easier.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Jay:

Sorry, you're stuck with ten (10) disks as the requirement. That's one downside of striping.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Alessandro Pilati]

Seems you need to create other 10 disks, I'm not sure if a cheat to around this exists...
Maybe these links can be helpful for you:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?threadId=591709

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=941616&admit=-682735245+1126024396748+28353475

good Luck,
Alex

[Stuart Abramson]

Not only do you need another 10 volumes, but they must be of equal to or greater size than the 1st 10.

You're absolutely right about the 5/5 thing.

Not only that but you can't pvmove them or mirror/reduce the volumes out.

Bummer...

[S.Rider]

Stuart,
Am I understanding you correctly ? Right now, I have 10 EMC disks of approx 11.6gb each in the volume group. These 10 disks are all full. I don't need to double the size of the filesystem. I know I need to get another 10 disks to extend the volume group and lvol, but I was hoping to get away with some smaller ones. Maybe 10 new EMC disks of 5gb each.
Do I need to get 10 more disks of at least the same 11.6gb size ?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Jay:

The new disks could be smaller or larger (physically) than the existing ones. Remember that the volume group's 'max_pe' and 'max_pv' ares fixed during the volume group creation ('vgcreate'), however. Hence if you choose to add very large disks you might not be able to address all of their physical extents, thereby wasting storage. If you choose "small" disks, then you may later find that adding additional physical volumes can't be done because the volume group's 'max_pv' has been reached.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Tim Nelson]

why not add just a volume or two more to the volume group, extend the lvol and fs ?

You may not have the same performance but if space is the issue and not having another 10 spindes is not a big deal then why not ?

On some symmetrix version you can expand the meta. i.e. add another hyper or two to the existing 10 member meta. I have not seen how HPUX responds to the change in disk geometry but maybe someone else has experienced.

[Stuart Abramson]

I dont' think that you can add a smaller disk. You must extend every stripe by the same amount - won't that fill up the new PVs the same size as the old PVs?

But you do have to have room in your VG to hold more disks. (max_pe, max_pv, etc..)

Somebody above suggested a good idea, which we do here: Create new lvols that aren't striped and just tell the Oracle DBA to put his new "oradatas" (tablespaces or tables or whatever they call them) in the new Mount Point. The DBA doesn't care about Volume Groups, just Mount Points.