Thx for the answers so far. I did an experiment on a fiber channel SAN. Extent end increases of LUNs are to different things if I am right?
Here is what I did on the fiber channel. I added a LUN nr. 2 on the EVA Storage. Size 5 GB. Opened vCenter and scanned the hba, the storage appeared. I added it to an ESXi server. Now when the server could see it went back to EVA storage and increased the LUN to 7GB. I rescanned all hba's and the new size appeared. Right click on it, gave me properties of the storage, at the top left corner there was a button called Increase. I pressed it, and got the option to extend it fully to 7GB. I did that, and everything worked. Is this best practices, or is this not recommended?
Now to answer your questions natanw.
My LUN is 400GB now; I'll need approximately 400 more. I can create a new LUN, BUT this is a very sensitive production environment and i can’t take down any servers, and I don’t have storage vMotion license. The number of VMs, hmm about 10 maybe, maybe less. Its Linux machines mostly.
Now a bit about the infra-structure. I have Two Equallogic disk arrays. One is running on 15k SAS disks with Raid 50, and one is running on SATA disks. The one that is running on SATA has mostly test, and development LUNS, not much space needed there, but is still using some. That doesn’t matter as I have 2.5 TB on that SAN. Now, the fast one has only 1 TB, and I tend to use it ONLY for production servers, as it is ultra-secure with the RAID 50 configuration + 2 hot spares. I am really missing storage vMotion, but we just don’t have the money for enterprise license now. So, what is the best thing to do? Create another LUN the same size, or increase the size of the existing LUN? Or, yes there is a third option Move this LUN to the slow disk array, create one large LUN, 800-900 GB and cold migrate the VM’s to that LUN, and delete the original production LUN?
Any ideas?
Thx
