Can logical drives be added/changed/removed from ESXi or RCLI?

[digglife]

I have not seen this answered anywhere ...

I have an ESXi (stand alone for now) 4.0 U1 server with a production host on it. Hardware-wise, its a Proliant DL385 system, with 1 logical RAID1 drive configured (2 disks) and a 4 disk RAID 5 logical drive configured. So, 2 datastores, 1 RAID1 and 1 RAID5. For various reasons, I need the empty RAID5 logical drive removed and reconfigured as two RAID1 drives. This ideally needs to be done while an important VM on the original RAID1 datastore is running.

I have seen no tools to manage raid logical drives in ESXi (I installed it with the HP-centric ESXi install ISO ) that I can find. I even went so far as to enable SSH into it to look around but didnt get anywhere.

I do have a vCenter license, just waiting for hardware to install it on at the moment, but I dont know if this grants any extra availability.

So, how can I accomplish the modification or addition of RAID disks/logical drives from within ESXi, without having to reset and get into the BIOS to do so? There must be a way ... or am I crazy????

[lamw]

This is not possible today, you'll need to reboot the host and go into the RAID utilities and reconfigure, this is being done at the hardware level and there are no tool/utilities that exists within the Busybox console nor using any of the remote CLI's. The only option is if you had an additional host and setup an NFS datastore and having vCenter, perform a live migration to that host while you rebuild your RAID. Though you mentioned this was a stand alone, I'm assuming you don't any another host nor vCenter.

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William Lam

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