Dell PERC13 and PERC12 User’s Guide PERC H975 Series and PERC H965 Series cards

Online capacity expansion

You can dynamically expand an online VD by using Online Capacity Expansion (OCE).

NOTE:The OCE feature is not supported on spanned VDs such as RAID 50 and RAID 60. Also, OCE is not supported on RAID 10.

NOTE:If multiple VDs exist within a common disk group or if a single VD does not start at the first block of the disk group, the OCE operation is not supported on those VDs.

NOTE: OCE typically impacts disk performance until the expansion operation is completed.

Drive mixing rules apply to an OCE operation which does not allow mixing of:

SAS and SATA drives
HDDs and SSDs
NVMe drives with HDDs and SSDs

An OCE operation can be performed in the following methods:

If there is free space available in a disk group, the capacity of a virtual disk can be expanded within the available free space.
If there is no free space available within the disk group, physical disks can be added to the virtual disk to increase its capacity.
After replacing all disk group members with larger drives than the original member drives, use the PERC CLI utility to expand the existing disk group to a larger size using the Expand Disk Group feature.

CAUTION: Do not remove drives or attempt disk migration during OCE operations. This results in loss of VDs.

NOTE: An OCE operation is not supported when another OCE operation with PD addition is in progress on the controller.

NOTE:When an OCE operation is started on a VD, all VDs with write-back cache policy that is present on the controller are converted to write-through. Cache policy is restored to its original setting after the OCE operation is completed.

NOTE:An OCE operation is not supported when certain background operations are in progress on a VD or conversely. Any pending operations will start after the current operations are completed. Example operations are:

Virtual Disk Initialization
Consistency Check
Background Initialization
Drive Rebuild
Copyback
Patrol Read

NOTE: If the controller already contains the maximum number (64) of VDs (all VD configurations except a single drive R0), contains the maximum number (240) of disk groups, or surpasses the maximum number (240) of configured PDs with the OCE operation, you cannot perform an OCE operation.

NOTE:The RAID Level Migration (RLM) feature is not supported on PERC12 and later version of controllers.

Dell PERC13 and PERC12 User’s Guide PERC H975 Series and PERC H965 Series cards

Online capacity expansion

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