Our Windows team frequently asks us to extend the size of a LUN for them and the then extend the volume onto the LUN. Also, becasue they often have some performance requirements, especially on SQL boxes, our standard is to give them striped meta LUNs which are tedius to expand. It would be much better if they used a host side volume manager that could work with LUNs as volume building blocks as is common with UNIX hosts.

Question: How do you guys deal with this requirement? Do you require volume management on Windows hosts or do you accomodate LUN expansions whenever requested? If you require volume management, do the Windows guys simply span SAN disks or do you install something 3rd party like VxVM?

Any advice appreciated!