Adding more physical disks, md3000i?

You can do it in the command line as well and add all 4 drives at once.

The command line interface guide/manual is available from <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>. You may have to scroll down a bit to see it (depending on your resolution).

If you want to extend the size of an existing virtual disk, you'll also have to use the command line tool, so you'd have to become a little familiar with it.

I don't have the commands to add disks to a diskgroup with smcli, but here is the command to grow an existing virtual disk:

smcli -n array_name -c "set virtualdisk [\"virtualdiskname\"] addCapacity=size_in_bytes";

I think the newer firmwares also allow the size to be specified in MBs or GBs.

NOTE: don't grow virtual disks over 2TB (2048GB) unless you have verified your OS supports this and that your OS is ready for it. VMware only supports disks over 2TB if it's vSphere5 and the disk was originally formatted with the VMFS 5 filesystem (maybe also after a conversion from VMFS 3 to VMFS 5, but I'm not 100% sure on that). Windows can only use disks over 2TB if the partition table is GPT. If it's currently not GPT, the only way you could ever use the space after the 2TB mark on the drive would be to back up your data, delete the partitions, convert to GPT, recreate the partitions and restore your data. There are some software packages that may be able to change to GPT with data in place, but these are likely not to be free and you still want to have a backup of your data, just in case.

I tried to find it in the CLI....     Never did find how to add physical disks to an existing disk group.  

But I probably will find the above command useful once I get the disks added.  I mean it took all day to add one.

The host is a Storage unification / virtualization server which wants really big luns, like the entire tray of drives in one lun.   It is still test and I can re-init the groups,  but I wanted to test how the storage server reacts to increasing the size of a lun presented to it.

By the way?  Dell support states the command is NOT published or known and you can only do one at a time.  :(

That really stinks.

In the CLI manual look for "set diskgroup". In the 2nd gen manual it's on page 173. It has a sub-command for "addPhysicalDisks". I would think that that can add multiple disks to an existing diskgroup.

Thanks...    I can try it on the last two.   Once you start adding one with MDSM there is a message that states that it can't stopped and it won't let you issue another command until the current operation is completed.

A little more help?  The command states DiskGroupNumber?      Not name?      So where do I find the DiskGroupNumber for a given DiskGroupName?

PS:  A little dissapointed the Dell tech could not point me in the right direction on this one.