Expand VMFS?

[RaglanDan]

A while ago I did something dumb and expanded my LUN without thinking and then realised I was unable to expand my VMFS volume without adding an extent. Now apparently with vSphere we are able to expand the VMFS volume but I can't find anything on how to do this. Can anyone assist me to reclaim my 200Gb!

Any help appreciated.

[COdlk]

What I would do is create a brand new LUN and move all your VMs over to the new VM. Destroy the old LUN and recreate that LUN.

david

[RaglanDan]

I Would love to but I don't have the disk for this...

I have found this but on his screenshot it has a Yes in the Expandable column - mine says No even though it is reporting almost 200Gb unallocated on the LUN... Any ideas why?

[GeorgeMahesh]

If the expandable column says 'no', it is clear that you cannot expand your VMFS datastore and your lun is already partitioned and formatted with a file system. Please click next on the same wizard and check if the next page displays the partition information of your lun and the available free space on it and verify if you can see free space on it.

If you do not see any free space but some unwanted partition, you will have to delete those partitions using fdisk and clean up. Eventually, the next time you go into the 'Volume Grow' wizard the cleaned up partition space will be available as free space to expand. Go ahead and expand your VMFS for that much of space.

[malaysiavm]

you may wanna try the vsphere 4 with thin provisioning turn on, that will help you to reclaim the additional disk space which are not fully utilize

Craig

vExpert 2009

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[RaglanDan]

I don't think that the LUN has any filesystem on it - see screenshots below. Could it be that I need to power down all running VM's on VOL_Data_01 before I will be able to expand it?

[GeorgeMahesh]

I referred to the attached disk layout screen. Please let me know the details on that screen and check my earlier comments.

[RaglanDan]

Sorry - I thought I had attached this on my last comment - something must have gone wrong with my post.

[dkfbp]

Hi,

The screenshot looks right. What happens if you press "Next" and on the next screen choose "Maximize capacity"?

Best regards

Frank Brix Pedersen

[RaglanDan]

In my screenshot it simply says 'Free space' will be used whereas in George's screenshot it says 'Free space' will be used to expand the volume...

This volume has production machines on it and I do not have enough spare disk to move them elsewhere if I choose Maximise capacity and end up creating an extent rather than expanding the volume...

[GeorgeMahesh]

Please take a screen shot of the 'Maximise capacity' window for more analysis without going all the way in the wizard.

[RaglanDan]

[GeorgeMahesh]

I understand the original size of the lun was 999GB and you used the entire space for the VMFS volume. When you wanted to increase the capacity of the VMFS volume, you went to the storage and expanded the lun from 999GB to 1.17TB adding 200GB more to the lun. Now after rescan from the host, you see that the lun is reflecting the new size but not showing the new size for expansion. Please do a esxcfg-scsidevs -m to find the mapping of the VMFS volume in question and take the /dev/sdx to do a fdisk of the same. Let us see the partitions of the lun and decide our further course of action. I still doubt if we could reclaim the 200GB as you have already expanded the lun from the storage side (downsizing the lun is not possible). We can only try to see if we can grow the volume with that space without adding it as an extent.

[RaglanDan]

I have since raised a job with VMWare and had a CSR contact me withing 60 minutes of logging the job (excellent customer service). I still have a 3.5 host accessing the datastore so apparently this could be restricting my ability to expand the volume although it might still no be expandable even once the host is upgraded as the LUN was expanded while the volume was managed by 3.5 rather than by 4.0...

I will upgrade the host and post my results.

[RaglanDan]

I just completed upgrading all my hosts to ESX 4.0 and once this was complete I was able to expand my VMFS volume as expected. Thanks for your help on this.