Dynamic drives across multiple LUNS

[mc_an]

Is it good practice to expand a Windows drive across multiple LUNS? How would that affect snapshots?

[EGRAdmin]

Hi mc_an,

Your situation is going to depend on a few factors.

Are your LUNs coming from different SANs?

Are you using RDM's or just provisioning new VMDK's for that partition?

Are you hosting a file share that is a single 2TB volume that you want to expand past the standard volume maximum?

Is this local disk or shared storage among hosts?

I find it easier to use tools like diskpart/extpart and the VMDK expansion tools provided by VMware to grow your existing volumes rather then map additional disks to your Dynamic disk / RAID-0. I personally avoid spanned volumes unless there is no other option.

I generally do the following;

Expand the guest vmdk in the VIC then expand the partition on the system.

If the datastore is too small I will svmotion the volume to a larger LUN. If it's vSphere you can grow the VMFS datastore and then expand the vmdk and grow on the OS partition as needed.

Also to be safe be sure the SAN team provides the volumes from the same SAN if you need to span volumes.

If you do span volumes be sure to thuroughly doc the config.

Hope that helps.

-Eric

[AWo · Accepted solution]

Which VMware product do you use?

Are you useing RDM's as you talk about spanning NTFS partitions across LUN's? That's not the case if you use virtual disks on VMFS volumes.

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

Author @ vmwire.net

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