Expand RAID group

You do have another possible option for handling this (depending on OS version and current config of the F: volume).

If you are running Win2K or Win2K3 AND the F: drive is a dynamic volume configured on a dynamic drive then you could always add the new drives as a new RAID 10 group and carve the appropriate size LUN you want to add... then you would simply have to extend the volume into a spanned volume.

This is not the ideal if absolute highest performance is required, but it does ave the advantage of allowing you to use the full usable capacity (133GB) of the new drives. Adding them to a RAID 10 of 73GB drives will artificially limit them to that usable capacity (66GB).

Unfortunately I can't answer you original question cause we haven't done that before (at least not exactly that way). I think it should work, but I can't comment on expansion times or verify that it WILL work.

the 50G lun can be created from another raid group, i would make sure it's the same raid type and type of drives.

RAID type would be same (1/0) but drive size is different. 68g is current but the new drives are 133.

Thanks I had thought about dynamic disks. In fact, we did that with the old FC4700 we had. However, when we had the CX500 installed they (emc) recommended staying with Basic and just expanding metaluns with available space.

That's what we've been doing, too. However, you can only do that if the RAID has the free drive space. That's my problem. The RAID group is 100% used up so I need to add disks to the RAID group.

not necessarily, you can use meta volumes, for example if you have 100G lun and you need to expand it by 50G. Create a new 50G lun, then right click on the 100G lun and select expand, select concatenated and from the list find your 50G lun and hit next.

we've been using basic disk and if we need to expand a lun, we create a concatenated meta and use diskpart to extend the partition.

yeah, should not be an issue ..if you want to use striped metavolume then your new lun has to be identical size to the current one, if not then i would use concatenated metavolume, striped metavolume will give you slightly better performance but take much longer to expand and require more disk space for expansion.

Super. Thanks a lot! I just did it and used diskpart to extend the volume on the server/partition successfully.

There are two White Papers:

EMC CLARiiON MetaLUNs - Concepts, Operations and Management
EMC CLARiiON Best Practice for Fibra Channel Storage - release 22

Both of these documents provides very good information about metaLUNs and overall configuring the array.

Thank you, I will get those!