Adding additional drive to ESXi 4.1 Datastore on Dell PowerEdge R710

[CorporIT]

Greetings,

We currently have a Dell PowerEdge R710 with 6 direct-attached SAS disks configured in a RAID-1/RAID-5 configuration. One disk is configured as a global hotspare. I would like to add this hotspare disk into the RAID-5 array, where some VMs are living, to recover additional space. Has anyone been successful with doing this? Is the only way via the PERC BIOS management utility?

Thanks!

[J1mbo · Accepted solution]

I don't follow the "raid-1/raid-5" part. But assuming the array is raid-5, then yes it can be done and yes the BIOS utility is needed. The currently defined hotspare needs to be removed from that role, then added to the existing raid-5 array but without selecting capacity expansion. This will create some free space on the raid-5 array on which then a new logical volume can be created, which will then be seen by ESX as a new disk and hence another datastore can be added on that (or, it can be added to the first as an extent). HTH




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[CorporIT]

Thanks for answering... To clarify, the RAID-1 has ESXi installed on to it and the RAID-5 has VMs on it. So, this can be done without needing to copy the VMs off of the existing datastore on the RAID-5? (obviously, I would back everything up, prior).

Thanks again!

[J1mbo]

Yes, just be sure not to choose capacity expansion.

But FWIW, this box will perform much better running a 6-drive RAID-10. There is no point wasting two spindles for the ESXi install.




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[CorporIT]

Thank you!

[CorporIT]

I wanted to follow up with this post to share the route we ended up taking... Ultimately, we installed the Dell OpenManage 6.4 VIB on to ESXi 4.1 which allowed us to be able to access the PERC directly. We were able to remove the hotspare drive from its role and then add it to the exiting RAID-5 virtual disk. After the reconstruction was complete, we were able to extend the datastore successfully. To note, once we had access to the OpenManage console, there was no VM interruption or reboots needed (physical or virtual).

Hope this helps anyone in the same situation.

[mtechnical1]

I found this document of use:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/svradmin/5.1/en/omss_ug/html/vdmgmt.html#1295931

Specifically:

To Reconfigure a Virtual Disk: Step 1 of 3

1. Select the physical disks that you want to include in the virtual disk. You can expand the virtual disk's capacity by adding additional physical disks. On some controllers, you can also remove physical disks.
   
   
   

The changes you make to the physical disk selection are displayed in the Selected Physical Disks tableClick Continue to go to the next screen or Exit Wizard if you want to cancel.

To locate this task in Storage Management:

1. Expand the Storage tree object to display the controller objects.
   
2. Expand a controller object.
   
3. Select the Virtual Disks object.
   
4. Select Reconfigure from the Available Tasks drop-down menu.
   
5. Click Execute.
   

Hope this helps.

Daniel

www.mtechnical.co.uk