LUN expansion on a HP MSA 2012i for VMWARE 3.5 Update 3

[PTEastvale]

I have 5 ESX 3.5 Update 3 servers in a cluster with a HP MSA 2012i backend storage (iSCSI). 1TB has been allocated to VMware and it has been running for a while. I just purchased a bunch of additional drives and would like to expand the LUN to 2TB in the MSA. What is the recommended way to do this?

1) Set up a new 1TB LUN and use add extent in VMWare to create a single logical volume?

2) Expand the LUN in MSA from 1TB to 2TB and hope VMware can recognize the new LUN? Not sure if i have to reformat this VMFS volume in VMware.

Let me know. Thanks!

[Lightbulb]

"Set up a new 1TB LUN and use add extent in VMWare to create a single logical volume" is the only way you can expand the VMFS datastore.

You might want to create a separate VMFS datastore, that way if one LUN fails when using extents you will not lose the whole thing. As the MSA2000 systems have been a little twitchy that is what I would recommend (2 seperate datastores.

[weinstein5]

Option 1) is the way to do it - by adding an extent -

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[mike_laspina · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I don't think you should expand the LUN unless you have very large vmdk files. Too many VM's (15-20+ range) on a single LUN can end up creating to many SCSI reservation conflicts.

I would just create 1TB LUN's for the VM's.