Expand Datastore vcenter 4.1

[jasonwelch01]

Hello,

I have a SAN LUN which is presented as a datastore within vcenter 4.1.  This datastore is dedicated to 1 virtual machine as one volume on the vm.  i'd like to increase the size of this LUN/datastore because we need to expand free space of the volume on the VM.  What is best practice for doing this??

If I 'expand' the LUN on the SAN array, what are the steps, within vcenter, so that datastore now reflects the new size?  Or, do I have to create a brand new LUN (witth the new required space) and vmotion the VM's disk to this new datastore?

thank you

[a_p_]

No need to create a new LUN. You can easily expand the LUN on the storage to a maximum size of 2TB minus 512 Bytes (with ESXi 5.0 the maximum is ~64TB), then rescan the storage adapter(s) and grow the VMFS datastore using the wizard. All of these steps can be done without downtime, although I recommend not to do this during heavy load. Once the datastore shows the new size, you can grow the virtual disk and resize the guest OS's partition.

André

[jasonwelch01]

Thanks Andre

What are steps for using the datastore grow wizard

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[a_p_]

What are steps for using the datastore grow wizard

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Increasing the datastore using the wizard is actually pretty straight forward. Open the datastore's properties and click the "Increase..." button. If there is additional, adjacent free disk space you will be able to grow the datastore by just confirming each of the wizard's screens.

André

Sent from my rather old desktop PC

[jasonwelch01]

Running the datastore wizard, won’t wipe the contents already on that datastore, correct?? I’m assuming it wont but just want to double check.

Jason Welch | Infrastructure Engineer

Information Technology

[a_p_]

Running the datastore wizard, won’t wipe the contents already on that datastore, correct??

Yes, unless something unexpected happens. It's comparable to "diskpart extend" in Windows.

In some cases the additional disk space is not shown when you try to grow the datastore while logged in to vCenter Server. In this case use the vSphere Client and login to one of the hosts to run the wizard.

Again, make sure not to exceed the maximum LUN size of 2TB minus 512 bytes, otherwise you may not be able to access the datastore anymore!

André