Newbie - How do you tell ESX that the SAN has grown

[MikeDaws]

Hi

I have recently started a job which includes looking after the VMware!!!! I have not been for training yet so please excuse my patchy understanding.

We have an issue where we have been taking snapshots and the SAN disk holding these and the Virtual Machines filled up. This caused the machines not to be able to startup.

Now we have grown the disk at the SAN end but how do I make ESX aware that the disk size have changed.

Thanks

[depping]

You actually can't resize a VMFS Datastore this way. You can only extend a VMFS Datastore with another VMFS Datastore. But I would suggest deleting snaps one by one, start with the vm's that only have 1 snapshot and work your way up. This can take a while though.

Duncan

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[dconvery]

Someone will suggest using an extent..DON'T. If you are running ESX3.5, you can use storage VMotion as well. Just create a new LUN and move some VMs over. If you do not have 3.5, you can shut down a VM and then migrate it to a new LUN. But you still need to get rid of the snapshots at some point. If these snapshots have been hanging around for a while, you may need to clone the VMs to start fresh..

[DR3Z]

I have to agree with dconvery, Instead of making the LUN bigger you should have had the SAN admin create a new bigger LUN. Powered off the VM and moved it to a separate datastore (the new LUN). This way you can still use your snapshots. I've found that doing the extent with vmkfstools is hit or miss and if its a VM that you need you dont want to chance it.

[markvr80]

What is wrong with using extents? I do it and it seems to work fine.

[dconvery]

Yes, they work fine. The issue is that it is a cancatenated software RAID-0. If you lose one piece, you lose it all. I would not want to risk production on that. Also, it is against best practices. Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD.

I knoe this is just my own opinion, but it makes sense in my little pin head... 🐵

Dave