Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Dell MD 3000i - Expandng a Virtual Disk

Unlike a lot of companies, we don't purchase our iSCSI arrays full of drives. We add them as we go, increasing the size of certain virtual disks.

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

  1. Open the Dell Modular Disk Storage Manager
  2. Click the Modify Tab
  3. Click Add Free Capacity (Physical Disks)
  4. Follow the prompts (this is the easy part)
This step can take some time to complete. Depending on the size and type of RAID you are running, it may take over a day to complete. It will not take the disk group down, but may slow things a bit.

Step 2 - Expanding a Virtual Disk

  1. Determine the amount of space you wish to add in bytes. I recommend that you use this calculator.
  2. On the computer running Dell Modular Disk Storage Manger, open a command prompt.
  3. Navigate to Program Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\Cli
  4. Use the smcli command to expand the disk. Examples below:
Basic Syntax
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:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the link. For me, the smcli command was in c:\program files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\CLIENT\

Unknown said...

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?

Unknown said...

Thank you. Very helpful. It's a shame we can't just add the maximum capacity available, rather than having to calculate it.

Unknown said...

Thanks Jacob. Even the CLI documentation from the Dell website isn't clear on performing this task.

Nice work!

Kevin said...

Also, if your device has a password you can specify it with "-p password"

Sidnei Moreira said...

thanks for this valuable help.
i agree with andrew that even dell docs are not so clear.

Anonymous said...

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.

Jacob Ackerman said...

Thanks! I'm glad everyone has found it useful.

Anonymous said...

Very useful !! Thanks a lot!!

Anonymous said...

Thanks !

Anonymous said...

Great post. I have it bookmarked for reference. Can you please update the calculator link as it is dead. Thanks for your insight.

Jacob Ackerman said...

Thanks for the heads up. I've updated the link to a new calculator.

Unknown said...

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!