Extend Raid5 with a new HD (HP DL380 G3)

Question

Because one of our customers is running out of disk space, I need to extend his Raid5 with one more disk.

At the moment the raid5 contains 3x72gb harddisk. The harddisk i want to add is exactly the same one.

He's running Win2003std on a HP Pro Liant DL380 G3

what would be the best (fastest) way? and do i need to convert the partition to dynamic volume?

anybody tried that with the HP tools?

kind regards

sam

Solution 1

Assuming you're using the HP controllers: You'll need to reboot, hit whatever the key is to get into the RAID controller, add the new drive to the container, and then wait for the array to rebuild. When you boot up, you'll need to expand the partition.

It's fairly simple once you start doing it, but schedule more downtime than you need and take a backup first just to be safe. That's just good practice any time you're messing with the storage layer.

If you're using software raid or a non-HP controller... well, you're kinda on your own, kid.

Solution 2

If you installed the HP Array Configuration Utility CLI, you should have a hpacucli.exe program which allow you to add your disk without rebooting your server.

Not sure how it works on windows but it does without problems on linux.

It should be something like

hpacucli ctrl slot=0 array A add drives=1I:1:4

then extend the logical drive

hpacucli ctrl slot=0 logicaldrive 1 modify size=max

Comments

[David Yu]

Are they using one of the HP Smart Array controllers?

[user649002]

yey they use the smart array controller

[user649002]

hum thx sound's easy, I hope the RAID Controller supports the expandation. As far as I remember i did not see that function in the raid setup... to expand the partition i use a tool like partition magic or will it be automatic resized when using dynamic volumes? what do you suppose?

[Karl Katzke]

Sam, you won't see it unless you have a drive that the array can be expanded into. Sorry, I can't help you with the Windows side of things... I don't touch that stuff. Rots your brain and all that.

[Steven]

I generally boot the server with a knoppix cd, use parted to expand the partition (you could do gparted for a graphical interface), then use ntfsresize to expand the file system. I haven't used dynamic disks in windows - it could be if you change your disks to dynamic you'll be able to expand the partition and filesystem from with in windows.

[user649002]

Thanks you I expanded the Raid5 today with the HP Tools, it was quite easy and could do it while Windows was running. There are 3 steps. 1) Adding the HD to the raid (takes a lot of time ~10h and about 50% cpu) 2) adding the new logic space to the current logic space (5-10Minutes) 3) adding the unallocated space to the existent space. (did it with acronis, needs a reboot and 15minutes)

[wazoox]

Afterwards you'll certainly need to reboot so that windows see the disk with its new size. Then you should be able to grow the filesystem using a Linux live CD with gparted, or maybe from windows (but for that one I don't actually know how).