Adding Hardrives to ESX 3.01 HP ML570 Servers

[leaguester]

Forumers,

Please advice on a white paper or KB article that explains how I can add 4 - 300 GB drives to an existing Raid 5 array at the HP hardware level (possibly smart start) and then expand the space on a current ESX Host.....I need to do this on two nodes before implementing an HP MSA1500 SAN for the backend storage expansion VMs....Thx...

Message was edited by:

leaguester

[wcrahen · Accepted solution]

Not sure about white papers. Are these ESX servers already built and the goal is to use these drives for VMFS space? You would just add the drives, then using the array configuration utility, which is accessible at boot-up, you can expand the existing array if the drive sizes are the same. Rather than extending the existing logical drives I would recommend create a new logical drive. Then use the VI client to format the new logical drive as VMFS.

[leaguester]

the two esx servers are built...

I have moved all VMs to esx1 and have esx2 for testing.

I am looking into expanding the current storage from 4 x 300 GB HD raid 5 to 8 x 300 GB HD raid 5 by just adding the needed drives and expand the current ESX2 VMFS space.

I do know that a reboot is needed to add the drives at the harware level on an HP box but I'd like to see some write up on the details if available to expand the cutrrent VMFs.

Thx.....

Message was edited by:

leaguester

[acr]

Expandidng VMFS Partitions (known as extents) wouldnt be a best practice, youd be better off simply creating additional VMFS Partitions and storing any new VM's in them.

This would give you much better scaleability and reduce the risk of performance issues.

[leaguester]

okey dokey......as I see on some forum posts, should I also just blast out the current vfms (only one) partition and recreate it after adding the needed drives?