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12935
November 28th, 2011 23:00
New disks to be installed on a PowerEdge R810 under ESX: how to?
Hi from France,
I'm quite new to R810 server type... We have a server with 3 HDD 500Gb each, under RAID5 (nearly 1Tb storage space in total) and we now have 3 more disks 500Gb each to install in the 3 remaining slots. We have VMWare ESX OS on this server.
Is there anything special I should know or do before inserting my new disks? Is BIOS going to manage automatically my now 6 disks correctly ? I guess what I want is a RAID5 system showing 2,5Tb storage space.
Thanks for any help understanding what I'm doing!!!
Syl
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SGillet
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November 28th, 2011 23:00
I also searched this forum and did find articles on OMSA for vSphere 5... So I just want to add we're running ESX 4.1 only...
JOHNADCO
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November 29th, 2011 08:00
I'd leave the existing stor as it is and put the new disks in their own raid 5. Esx / Esxi should see it and allow you to provision space from it as normal.
Dev Mgr
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9.3K Posts
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November 29th, 2011 12:00
You'll have to configure this new raid 5 in the PERC bios, unless you installed OMSA 6.5 for ESX4.
SGillet
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December 1st, 2011 02:00
Thanks a lot for your answers.
I installed OMSA 6.4, isn't it enough?
Moreover, I got information from Dell Support: they recommend indeed to create another RAID array for my 3 news disks. But it means I'll lose 500Gb again... What is the issue if I still try to put my 6 disks in the first RAID array already configured and in use?
Dev Mgr
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December 1st, 2011 06:00
vSphere4 doesn't support disks over 2TB (2048GB minus 512 bytes to be exact). So, if you make it a 6-disk raid 5 with 500GB drives, you'd get a virtual disk of 5 x 500GB x ~93% (decimal to binary conversion) = ~2325GB. At best you'd be able to use the first 2048GB of this, but it could also cause you to lose access to the disk completely. With vSphere5 (and VMFS5 (clean format, not an upgrade)) you can go over 2TB.
JOHNADCO
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847 Posts
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December 1st, 2011 08:00
4.1 defiently will wig on the size being over 2gb-215bytes. What raid controller? Some woudl let you start from scratch and do all the space in the same diskgroup and then divide the 2 diskgroups into 2 virtual disks.
Really though, I'd seriously add three new disks into a new raid 5. If that is not enough space? Buy larger drives and do it, but still don't go over 2TB in size total with it.