How to expand RAID group??

The Expand button is enabled only for RAID Groups that support expansion (i.e. all RAID Groups except RAID 1, RAID 3, RAID 6, Disk and Hot Spare).

Hi,

As per this primus article : emc269369 , RG expansion is disabled from FLARE Release 31.

So you can only expand the pool in this case.

Hi,

Can i create Storage pool of 3 disks (2 new and 1 hot spare) and migrate data of RAID group 2 to Pool, then destroy RAID group 2 and add 3 disks from it to Pool. and set 1 as hot spare?

Will it create 5+1 RAID 5 pool.

We have RAID group 5 but still expand is not available. It is available only in pool.

Hi,

I think yes, you have to create pool with 3 disks and create the LUNs and migrate it to the storage pool, once migration is done, the LUNs from the RG will be destroyed by migration process, then you can add the 3 RG disks back to the storage pool.

regards,

Sameer

Hi,

Thanks for your replay.

Will it create one 5+1 RAID or two 2+1 RAID?

hot spare will be created as a regular raid groups. So if you have 2 new drives right now, can't do anything with them (need at least 3 drives to create a pool). Once you migrated all LUNs from one of the raid groups, that will give you another 4 drives. With 6 drives you can create a pool (5+1).

https://community.emc.com/thread/123588

The storage pool should be already created, you can expand as per your requirement. I would suggest you to go through Unisphere Online Help for configuring Storage groups.

Regards

Sameer

The 2tb limit is a limitation of MBR style of disks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

Hello ,

We have expanded 500gb lun to 2.5 TB using lun from raid group 5 ,however host end shows below error:

and at host disk management it only shows 2 TB space and 500Gb unallocated status,when right clicked on 2 TB and tried to extend the volume it shows ....the above error (snap)

From storage end (VNX) it the lun size shows 2.5 TB

.

Hey thanks for quick response ,I have gone through this article.

Is that means that this disk cannot be extended more than 2TB ?

What about if we convert that disk to Dynamic and then try to extend ,more 500gb to make it 2.5 Tb,will this work ?

as we have already have one more 2008 server which has same OS ( wIN 2008) and has 10 Tb  BASIC drive (Lun from SAN),

can we provide complete new 2.5 tb Lun to Host ,and then moving old data from 500 gb to new 2.5 TB,since its a MBR disk and contains Logical information ....will data be in risk ?

indeed. RG expansion cannot be done anymore starting with VNX.

yep, two options:

1) convert to dynamic

2) create a new LUN, set as GPT and migrate using host based tools (robocopy/emcopy). Can't use Clone or PowerPath Migraiton enabler because they are block based tools and will move your MBR based partition to target.

Just to add to dynamox's response to provide other options, which also qualifies as a host-based tool, you can use EMC Open Migrator to migrate also between the two since Open Migrator moves NTFS clusters.

Having said that (and not necessarily relevant to this question) this is also why Open Migrator can not be used if you also want to change the NTFS Allocation Unit Size from say 4KB (default) to 64KB.  That would require a file-based copy such as the tools already mentioned by dynamox.

Anyways, just wanted to provide more options.