I'm interested in hearing about any experiences with doing "Active"
Raid 5 Volume expansions, however, with a slight twist.

I'd like to take 4 x 36.4 gb drives that are apart of an existing
logical drive in an Array and one-by-one swap out the 36.4gb disks
with larger capacity 146gb drives.

The goal in the end is to extend that "New" logical drive to encompass
all of the new space that has just been introduced.

I'm trying to avoid server downtime and having to send engineers
onsite to perform any activities.  We want to save on T&E and not have
any outages for the users.

All of my hardare is Windows 2K\2K3 & on Compaq\HP servers.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Bill wrote:

> I'm interested in hearing about any experiences with doing "Active"
> Raid 5 Volume expansions, however, with a slight twist.
>
> I'd like to take 4 x 36.4 gb drives that are apart of an existing
> logical drive in an Array and one-by-one swap out the 36.4gb disks
> with larger capacity 146gb drives.
>
> The goal in the end is to extend that "New" logical drive to encompass
> all of the new space that has just been introduced.
>
> I'm trying to avoid server downtime and having to send engineers
> onsite to perform any activities.  We want to save on T&E and not have
> any outages for the users.
>
> All of my hardare is Windows 2K\2K3 & on Compaq\HP servers.

Depending on the age of the RAID controllers (and firmware) and the
version of the RAID management software this can indeed be done with
Windows on HP/Compaq hardware.
However if you want to add the newly created space to an existing
Windows partition you'll need the 'DISKPART.EXE' utility from MS. This
utility has some restrictions. I don't think you can expand your boot
partition for example and it has some other restrictions as well.
Make sure you know what to do and how long it will take to rebuild your
OS and restore data in case something goes wrong!

B.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Benno... wrote:

> Bill wrote:
> 
>
>
> Depending on the age of the RAID controllers (and firmware) and the
> version of the RAID management software this can indeed be done with
> Windows on HP/Compaq hardware.
> However if you want to add the newly created space to an existing
> Windows partition you'll need the 'DISKPART.EXE' utility from MS. This
> utility has some restrictions. I don't think you can expand your boot
> partition for example and it has some other restrictions as well.
> Make sure you know what to do and how long it will take to rebuild your
> OS and restore data in case something goes wrong!

I just tried this on a Compaq ML350G03 with a Smart Array 5300
controller and Array Configuration Utility 7.0.1.0. W2K SP4.

The machine has a boot/system partition on two drives in RAID1 and a
data partition on 3 72.8GB drives in RAID5. One by one I replaced the
72GB drives with 146.8GB drives. The rebuilding takes around 20 minutes
per drive (rebuild and expand time set to "high"). When you swap the
last drive you will see the new free space becoming available.
You can either create new a logical drive(s) with that space or expand
the existing logical drive. For some unclear reason some space (28GB)
remained unused after expanding the logical drive in my situation.
Expanding also has some restrictions if you do not have at least SP3
installed with dynamic disks. Basic disks should always work.
After you have expanded the logical drive, use diskpart.exe to add the
expanded space to your existing Windows partition.
Everything can be done without a single reboot, I did not check the
performance impact however.

YMMV (a lot).
B.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

"Benno..." <0@0.invalid> wrote in message news:<40f7a1c1$0$2995$4d4ebb8e@news.nl.uu.net>...[
vbcol=seagreen]
> Benno... wrote:
> 
>
> I just tried this on a Compaq ML350G03 with a Smart Array 5300
> controller and Array Configuration Utility 7.0.1.0. W2K SP4.
>
> The machine has a boot/system partition on two drives in RAID1 and a
> data partition on 3 72.8GB drives in RAID5. One by one I replaced the
> 72GB drives with 146.8GB drives. The rebuilding takes around 20 minutes
> per drive (rebuild and expand time set to "high"). When you swap the
> last drive you will see the new free space becoming available.
> You can either create new a logical drive(s) with that space or expand
> the existing logical drive. For some unclear reason some space (28GB)
> remained unused after expanding the logical drive in my situation.
> Expanding also has some restrictions if you do not have at least SP3
> installed with dynamic disks. Basic disks should always work.
> After you have expanded the logical drive, use diskpart.exe to add the
> expanded space to your existing Windows partition.
> Everything can be done without a single reboot, I did not check the
> performance impact however.
>
> YMMV (a lot).
> B.[/vbcol]

Thanks for your comments.  I appreciate it.  When you did your swap of
the smaller disks with the larger ones did you do it hot or did you
power down the server, pull the disk out, power up and select F2 to
manually fail it?

HP advised against doing this without first having disk in a "failed"
state to avoid data corruption.  I'm also searching for a HP utility
that will allow me to force a disk to fail while the server is still
running so I don't have to power the servers off and there is no
downtime to the users.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

"Benno..." <0@0.invalid> wrote in message news:<40f7a1c1$0$2995$4d4ebb8e@news.nl.uu.net>...[
vbcol=seagreen]
> Benno... wrote:
> 
>
> I just tried this on a Compaq ML350G03 with a Smart Array 5300
> controller and Array Configuration Utility 7.0.1.0. W2K SP4.
>
> The machine has a boot/system partition on two drives in RAID1 and a
> data partition on 3 72.8GB drives in RAID5. One by one I replaced the
> 72GB drives with 146.8GB drives. The rebuilding takes around 20 minutes
> per drive (rebuild and expand time set to "high"). When you swap the
> last drive you will see the new free space becoming available.
> You can either create new a logical drive(s) with that space or expand
> the existing logical drive. For some unclear reason some space (28GB)
> remained unused after expanding the logical drive in my situation.
> Expanding also has some restrictions if you do not have at least SP3
> installed with dynamic disks. Basic disks should always work.
> After you have expanded the logical drive, use diskpart.exe to add the
> expanded space to your existing Windows partition.
> Everything can be done without a single reboot, I did not check the
> performance impact however.
>
> YMMV (a lot).
> B.[/vbcol]

This article also may be useful in discovering why disk space in an
array may not complete be available.  It depends on how what the
number of sectors per track are in the logical drive.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...01&locale=en_US

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Bill wrote:

> "Benno..." <0@0.invalid> wrote in message news:<40f7a1c1$0$2995$4d4ebb8e@n
ews.nl.uu.net>...
> 
>
>
> Thanks for your comments.  I appreciate it.  When you did your swap of
> the smaller disks with the larger ones did you do it hot or did you
> power down the server, pull the disk out, power up and select F2 to
> manually fail it?
>
> HP advised against doing this without first having disk in a "failed"
> state to avoid data corruption.  I'm also searching for a HP utility
> that will allow me to force a disk to fail while the server is still
> running so I don't have to power the servers off and there is no
> downtime to the users.

I did it 'hot' but it was only in a test environment with only a few MB
of data on the disks.

B.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]