About Online Capacity Expansion Under Netware 4.2 - HP P3410A - NetRAID 1M RAID Controller User Manual

Chapter 6
Preparation Steps for NetWare 4.2 explains how to enable Virtual Sizing
and how to partition your physical drives to use Online Capacity
Expansion.
Expanding Capacity Online under NetWare 4.2 describes how to use
the Online Capacity Expansion feature to add physical drives to your
system without restarting the HP NetServer.
Expanding Capacity under NetWare 4.2 with Virtual Sizing Disabled
describes how you can add disk capacity to an existing logical drive if you
didn't set up your logical drive initially to use the Online Capacity
Expansion feature.

About Online Capacity Expansion under NetWare 4.2

Normally, to add capacity you must shut down the server to reconfigure and then
restore data, or you must add the new storage space as a new volume. The Online
Capacity Expansion feature allows you to expand an existing logical drive without
shutting down the server.
Under NetWare 4.2, use Virtual Sizing to prepare for online capacity expansion.
Virtual Sizing is enabled separately on each logical drive. When enabled, the
controller presents to the operating system a logical drive of 144 GB, which is the
default size. Only a part of the 144-GB logical drive exists as actual physical
storage; the remainder is virtual storage. You configure volumes to use only the
actual physical space, while the virtual space allows room for online expansion.
NOTE
The 144-GB default size of the logical drive that the controller
initially presents to the operating system is the minimum size.
The size can be increased.
For example, assume you have one RAID-5 logical drive built from four physical
hard disk drives of 4 GB each. The result is 12 GB of actual storage space. If you
enable Virtual Sizing for this logical drive, then the operating system will see a
logical drive of 144 GB. Only the first 12 GB are real, 4 GB are used for parity,
and the last 128 GB are virtual.
Under NetWare 4.2, you create a 144-GB partition, but within that partition you
only create a logical drive totaling 12 GB or less. Since there is unused partition
space, the physical storage of 12 GB can be expanded online by adding another
hard disk drive, but the partition remains at 144 GB.
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Capacity Expansion