HPUX Servers: Expanding storage volume attached to EVA8100

[fh-djb]

Greetings,
I'm an EVA storage admin and have a question regarding how the HPUX OS functions with external storage. Is it possible to expand the size of a vDisk presented to an HPUX system and do some sort of IO scan on the host so that it "sees" the new amount of data without compromising the integrity of the existing data?

Example:
We have an Informix database residing on a 100GB vDisk (LUN) attached to an HPUX server. I want to expand the vDisk to 150GB. Can this be done? Will the HPUX host recalculate the disk space after some sort of IO scan?

I'm sorry, but I know nothing about HPUX. In Windows this is relatively easy to do with a diskpart /extend command without compromising the integrity of existing data.

[Torsten.]

You must have hp-ux 11.23 or 11.31.

You can modify LVM settings with vgmodify to apply these changes.

In 11.31 with LVM 2.x it may work automagically.

[Torsten.]

link:

http://docs.hp.com/en/vgmodify/vgmodify_wp_modified_final.pdf

[Tim Nelson]

Two additional points.

1) make sure to have a good backup of the data on that vol.

2) the volume on the server needs to be taken offline in order to execute the vgmodify steps.

Please post your successes.

[Torsten.]

@Tim:

from the release notes:

"The vgmodify command supports LUN expansion on a Version 1.0 volume group without deactivating the volume group. To reconfigure an activated volume group to take advantage of a physical volume size increase, use the â E and â a options to vgmodify. For example, if the physical volume /dev/disk/disk32 in volume group vg02 has been expanded, use the following command to add physical extents to it:..."

http://docs.hp.com/en/5992-4779/ar01s03.html

[Tim Nelson]

@Torsten, As usual you are probably right. Both man pages on 11.23 and 11.31 state..
The volume group can be active when reporting the configuration (-r)
or displaying a table of available settings (-t). The volume group
must be de-activated before vgmodify can perform any configuration
changes (see vgchange(1M)).
....

Looks like those with the Sept of 2008 release, doubt there are too many of those yet, do not have to deactivate the VG.

[Torsten.]

You are right - but I'm still not entirely sure how LVM 2.x will handle this ...