The instructions below will help you add a new disk to a Disk Group, then expand a virtual disk:
Step 1 - Adding a drive to a Disk Group
- Open the Dell Modular Disk Storage Manager
- Click the Modify Tab
- Click Add Free Capacity (Physical Disks)
- Follow the prompts (this is the easy part)
Step 2 - Expanding a Virtual Disk
- Determine the amount of space you wish to add in bytes. I recommend that you use this calculator.
- On the computer running Dell Modular Disk Storage Manger, open a command prompt.
- Navigate to Program Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\Cli
- Use the smcli command to expand the disk. Examples below:
smcli ArrayName -c "set virtualDisk ["virtualdiskname"] addCapacity=virtualdiskcapacityinbytes;"
Example
Lets say I have a:
MD3000i called Array001
A Virtual Disk called VD_Test
And I wanted to add 136 GB of space.
The command would look like this:
smcli -n Array001 -c "set virtualdisk [\"VD_Test\"] addCapacity=146028888064;"
Now this expands the virtual disk on the MD3000i, but the OS will not recognize it. You will need to use Disk Manager to expand the volume in Windows. In our case, we're using the MD3000i as a XenServer storage repository. There will be a future article on expanding the XenServer SR.
13 comments:
Thanks for the link. For me, the smcli command was in c:\program files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\CLIENT\
I got here by way of google looking for a way to add multiple disks to a disk group. I purchased three additional drives for my md3000i and went through the wizard to add one 1TB disk to a RAID 5.
This took close to 30 hours to complete and I still have two more disks to add to the same disk group.
On my MD1000s, I can use OpenManage to add all of the disks at once.
Any suggestions?
Thank you. Very helpful. It's a shame we can't just add the maximum capacity available, rather than having to calculate it.
Thanks Jacob. Even the CLI documentation from the Dell website isn't clear on performing this task.
Nice work!
Also, if your device has a password you can specify it with "-p password"
thanks for this valuable help.
i agree with andrew that even dell docs are not so clear.
Thanks for this! It worked like a champ. I will say that it took hours to expand the virtual disk only 136GB, but at least it finished and worked.
Thanks! I'm glad everyone has found it useful.
Very useful !! Thanks a lot!!
Thanks !
Great post. I have it bookmarked for reference. Can you please update the calculator link as it is dead. Thanks for your insight.
Thanks for the heads up. I've updated the link to a new calculator.
Very helpful, thank you. i had to talk to the right ip-adress of the right controller (wich handle the vd i want to expand), but then i works fine!
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