How can I add hard drives to my ESXI 4?

[smombe]

Hi everybody,

I have an ESXI 4 running on HP Pro Liant DL380G4 with 12GB of RAM and 400GB of internal hard disks over a RAID. There are many virtual machines running there, and now I need to add a couple of internal hard disks to the raid.

Can I add these disks (and make vmware see them) without re-installing everything? Is there an "official" answer for this issue?

Thank you very much.

[Digitalmind1]

adding an extra bit of hard disc to your existing machine shouldn;t be a big problem unless & until all they lies under same ASCII values

Jack.

Aerial and Satellite Installation

[smombe]

Thanks Jack. I'm sorry, but I don't understand your answer.

My disks are in RAID and they're my VM-WARE internal storage.

What do you mean with "under same ASCII values"?

[Yosias]

Yes that is possible we just did that. Just make sure when you boot the raiding option you create a different raid for the new disks. and then add that "disk" in the storage tab. make sure you do not RAID the old disks by mistake.

[Primordius]

Depending on the RAID controller and your existing RAID setup, you have two viable options:

1. Create another RAID volume on the existing controller, or new controller and rescan your HBA's to add the new storage to your datastore, or

2. Locate an iSCSI target or shared NFS volume for VMDK storage.

Running out of space for VM's since Svr 2008 was introduced forced us to look at iSCSI for a lot of our clients.

[AndreTheGiant]

Your actual RAID configuration is RAID1?

In this case I suggest to create a new RAID1 configuration and add an additional datastore.

If is RAID5 and you want to extend the esisting one, then the simple (from ESXi point of view) solution is create a new virtual disk (on the RAID controller) and add a new datastore.

Andre