Trouble extending a Windows clustered drive

[ewedemeyer]

!file:///C:/DOCUME_1/VHAISW3/LOCALS~1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg!I am trying to expand an existing drive that is clustered between 2 windows 2003 machines. I used the - thick option and the ls listing showed that the size changed.

However (see attachment) i get the ESX server cannot open the virtual disk ........ for clustering. .... Thin/TBZ disks cannot be opened in multiwriter mode.

[ewedemeyer]

attachment

[ewedemeyer]

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[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
Blue Gears and SearchVMware Pro Blogs -- Top Virtualization Security Links -- Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast

[Garrett_M_]

Hello!

We have the same issue. Windows 2003 MSCS cluster in box consisting of two SQL server VMs. We want to increase the size of the vmdk for the DB data drive. Were able to expand the LUN, expand the Datastore, but when we resized the vmdk the same error popped up. The vmdk is thick provisioned however so not sure what the error messages means.

Have you a way around this?

We are considering just creating a whole new virtual disk, adding it to the cluster and copying the data over.

Cheers,

Garrett

[Garrett_M_]

I was able to get support and the tech was able to provide a work around. Helped me out with a webex session. I was able to extend the vmdk of a vdisk used in a MSCS cluster using a series of vmkfstools commands. The basic steps were:

1. vmkfstools –E servervm.vmdk servervm_old.vmdk (this renames the vmdk)

2. vmkfstools –i servervm_old.vmdk servervm.vmdk –d thin (clones the renamed vmdk to original name in thin format)

3 vmkfstools –X 200G servervm.vmdk (expand the available size to 200 GB)

4. vmkfstools –j servervm.vmdk (inflates the vmdk in eargerzeroedthick format)

Wallah! The first node in the test cluster came up with free space available. Used Diskpart to increase disk in the OS. Step 4 above took two hours on a 100GB drive.

There is a VMware KB article about this as well.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1005473&sl...

We elected to approach the problem from a different angle however, which was to create a new vdisk and copy the database files to it.

The problem was cloning the disk used up a lot of space, expanding the disk took a long time.

Anyway it can be done.

Cheers,

Garrett

[mgambetti]

tested on windows 2008 r2, confirmed working perfectly!

thanks.