how to extend a virtual disk using perccli

Hello,

Here is a direct link to the page in the PERC CLI guide about creating virtual disks. It should be what you're looking for.

https://dell.to/36pBq1M

Hi,

Thanks for your answer, but what I want to do is to extend an existing virtual disk and not create a new virtual disk.

Will

$ perccli /c0/v0 expand size=2tb expandarray

do the trick? How does it know which physical disks to use to expand the array?

The additional disks are in the same enclosure.

I only use the tool for pulling logs from the PERCs. I'd have to yield to the manual on syntax. Generally speaking, I manage virtual disks from the iDRAC. Your syntax appears to match the manual, so I would expect it to work. 

I know that if you use the iDRAC's web interface, you can manually select each individual drive for the expansion.

iDRAC's IP address was not reachable and so I've made the new disks ready to work using the Lifecycle controller (LCC) but I didn't commit the last step. It seemed LCC was going to initialize also the disks already present in the array and I didn't want that.

perccli now reports:

# perccli64 /c0 show

TOPOLOGY :
========

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
DG Arr Row EID:Slot DID Type State BT Size PDC PI SED DS3 FSpace TR
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 - - - - RAID1 Optl N 1.818 TB dflt N N dflt N N
0 0 - - - RAID1 Optl N 1.818 TB dflt N N dflt N N
0 0 0 32:0 0 DRIVE Onln N 1.818 TB dflt N N dflt - N
0 0 1 32:1 1 DRIVE Onln N 1.818 TB dflt N N dflt - N
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

...

Virtual Drives = 1

VD LIST :
=======

-------------------------------------------------------------
DG/VD TYPE State Access Consist Cache Cac sCC Size Name
-------------------------------------------------------------
0/0 RAID1 Optl RW Yes NRWTD - OFF 1.818 TB
-------------------------------------------------------------

...

Physical Drives = 4

PD LIST :
=======

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
EID:Slt DID State DG Size Intf Med SED PI SeSz Model Sp Type
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
32:0 0 Onln 0 1.818 TB SAS HDD N N 512B ST2000NX0463 U -
32:1 1 Onln 0 1.818 TB SAS HDD N N 512B ST2000NX0463 U -
32:2 2 UGood - 1.818 TB SAS HDD N N 512B ST2000NX0463 U -
32:3 3 UGood - 1.818 TB SAS HDD N N 512B ST2000NX0463 U -
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Can iDRAC continue from here and add the disks in slots 2 and 3 to the array?

Will iDRAC create also a file system on the new disks?

Thanks!

The filesystem is going to be created by the OS. YOu;d need to set it up for ReFS, NTFS, ZFS, EXT4, etc on your own. The iDRAC can create and expand VDs (expansion is called reconstruction in the GUI). Choose to reconstruct the array and you can select individual disks to add. This video is a bit old, but should still be accurate to the process and match your iDRAC GUI.

https://dell.to/2OnJAl6

I would *HIGHLY* recommend against doing that. Do not use the Lifecycle controller for this. The Lifecycle Controller's RAID utility doesn't exist on it's own, it is explicitly part of the OS deployment wizard. What this would translate to is when you go through to create your virtual disk, it would delete all your other virtual disks, create the one for you to install an OS too, and leave you in a worse place compared to where you are now.

If you were able to get into the LCC interface, I would just use either the F2 menu and navigate to the RAID controller to create the VD there, or if you're in BIOS boot mode, from the Ctrl + R prompt. Neither of these processes would end up leaving you with a singular empty VD the way that the LCC would.

Thanks for the link.

The OS is already installed on the VD. The disk array has 2 disks online and I added 2 more disks which are ready to be put online.

This is what I don't understand: 2 of the disks in the array have a file system, the 2 new disks don't. Since physical disks in the array are not visible to the OS as independent physical devices, how does the file system is going to be made?

If you expand a virtual disk, the virtual disk will get bigger, but the filesystem will not expand. You will have to use the OS to expand the filesystem. For example, after expanding an array in the RAID controller (if your system was Windows) you would use Disk Management to expand the partition and file system into the raw space. You need to do the same with Ubuntu, but you wouldn't be using Disk Management. 

The process looks like this:

1. Insert new physical disks

2. Expand array (I recommend from the iDRAC, because it is easiest)

3. Use software to expand your filesystem into the newly available raw space.

This is a Redhat article, but hopefully it will provide some helpful information on resizing a partition. https://dell.to/2vN7qQP

I'll try it using iDRAC in the next maintenance window. In the meantime, the new disks are ready but not online yet (step 1).

I've been reading some Dell documentation and it is not so clear to me that expanding the capacity of a RAID 1 virtual disk by pairwise adding more disks to the array is possible. 

For example, in the support knowledge base article: Dell PowerEdge: How to change the RAID level of a Virtual Disk, in the table Possible RAID Level Migrations there is no RAID 1 to RAID 1 capacity expansion as for RAID 0 to RAID 0.

And in Table 37. RAID level performance comparison in the iDRAC8 User Guide, the Minimum Disks Required is 2N (N = 1) for RAID level 1. So, it seems N cannot be > 1, but is it only for creating virtual disks?

So, my questionn is: can a PERC H330 Adapter handle more than 2 disks in a RAID level 1 virtual disk?

Supported RAID 1 configs for the PERC are going to be 2 disks. I'm not aware of a method to have our controllers take any more than that into a RAID 1 volume, supported or not.