Add Physical Disk to Virtual Disk in PERC 5/E

Question

I added some disks into an PowerVault MD1000 storage array.

There's an existing Virtual Disk 0 that's a RAID 5 group. Can I

add my physical disks to that virtual disk? Or am I required to

create a new virtual disk instead? I was skimming through the

docs and didn't see anything about adding a physical disk, but

wanted to verify that's the case?

Thanks!

PsychoT · Answer

Correct.  Reconstructing the array will not harm the data.  You will however get a warning about Disk I/O and removing the system from the network to have the best possible results.  Essentially, you're re-writing all of the data from the existing drives across themselves as well as the new drives, so having that be the only process occuring on the system is the safest way to make sure it goes through with no issues.  As always, it is very advisable to get a verified backup before doing anything that puts your data at any type of risk.

PsychoT · Answer

You can add them to the virtual disk. You should be able to use OpenManage Storage Manager to go down to the Virtual Disk 0 and have an "Actions" drop down list, in there you will get the option to Reconstruct. Be careful though. Make sure you choose Raid 5 (or whatever level you want it to be), because if you don't specify the Raid level and leave that option blank it will default to a Raid 0. Also, in the text box for Virtual Disk size make sure you verify that it's the maximum size it would be after adding the new drive(s) as some of the past revisions would leave the Virtual Disk size the same. It's pretty easy if you just go slow, verify what you see and what you want. If you have any questions AT ALL, call tech support and they will help you out.

Also, by adding drives to the array, it will NOT expand your partition(s), you will have to do that using diskpart, extpart, or a similar utility. Since you're doing this on an MD1000 I'm assuming/hoping that this isn't a System Array/Volume, because diskpart will not expand system partitions and extpart has a 50/50 chance of working successfully on system volumes (if not done right it will toast the partition(s))

voipdude · Answer

@PsychoT wrote:

You can add them to the virtual disk. You should be able to use OpenManage Storage Manager to go down to the Virtual Disk 0 and have an "Actions" drop down list, in there you will get the option to Reconstruct. Be careful though.

Reconstruct. The existing data on the Virtual Disk is not destroyed?

Thanks!

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

Add Physical Disk to Virtual Disk in PERC 5/E

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