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loopman
Contributor
Contributor

Extended lun not visible

Needing some help on this one!

PE2900 host, esx3.5, PERC 6/i, 5 x 280GB(useable) HDD, RAID 5 array, 4 primary partitions (4th = extended)

  • Used GPartEd to increase the size of the extended partition from 550GB to 1TB
  • Rebooted the Host
  • fdisk -l shows extended partition correctly
  • vSphere shows device vmhba1:0:0 as being 1 TB in size
  • Going into vSphere storage properties to increase size from 550Gb to 1 TB does NOT reveal any extra storage to be added as an extent

I have conducted additional reboots of the host, "rescan" from within vSphere, "rescan" from command line ("vmkfstools -s vmbhba1" and "esxcfg-rescan vmhba1") to no avail.

Have I missed a step somewhere?

Thanks.

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4 Replies
rpetchim
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi,

Are you using vCcenter 4 and esx3.5?

esx4.0 onwards there is an option to grow vmfs volume to extended drives.

You can use, vmkfstools command with -G option to increase the vmfs volume and make use of the increased drive space.

-_R

Thanks, VCP410
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alefestaedist
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I would do this test:

1. "Add Extend" with/through vSphere vCenter 4 on any ESX  server in cluster - is it LUN visibile (I suppose not)?

2. "Add Extend" with/through VI client from local ESX  - is it LUN visibile?

if you do a rescan directly from the VI client from local ESX do you see the extent?

Alex

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loopman
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the interest people.

rpetchim - no unfortunately running esx3.5 on this one so cannot grow as described.

alefestaedist - no the lun wasn't visible however I re-scanned. Annoying that vSphere is indicating the Storage adapter (SAS controller) is the full 1TB in size but the Datastore is only allowing access to the original 550GB extent.

Unfortunately have had to move on to other higher priority tasks at moment, hope to get back to this soon.

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bulletprooffool
Champion
Champion

Check the block size on the Store - it could be that you need to reformat and rebuild from scrathc with the correct block size.

Also, I have previsously had problems adding Direct attached storage to ready built ESX hosts - posted a walkthrough here:

http://www.get-virtual.info/2011/02/09/adding-datastores-to-esxi-hosts-that-have-already-been-built/

One day I will virtualise myself . . .
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