Table of Contents
Advertisement
5.6
Expanding a Logical Drive
Online capacity expansion is the ability to increase the size of a logical system drive while normal reads and writes
occur. The expansion can be obtained when you change the RAID level, or increase the amount of space on the physical
drives allocated to the logical drive, or both. When performing this operation, you cannot change the write cache,
initialize drive, or stripe size of an existing logical drive. The user must stop the partner controller before starting a
logical drive expansion process. When this occurs, a consistency check begins if the logical drive is in write-through
cache mode. You must wait until the consistency check completes before expanding your logical drive. When the
logical drive expansion is complete, you can restart the partner controller.
The following restrictions are enforced by the controller in the processing of this function:
•
The maximum number of disk drives in the source RAID set is 16.
•
The new disk drives must be added to the system while power is supplied.
•
The disk drives being added must not already be part of an array.
•
The system drive to be expanded must be online and in Optimal state.
•
The capacity of each of the added disk drives must be greater than or equal to that of the smallest disk drive in the
RAID set.
Using the enlarge system drive option, the system drive specified is enlarged as well as having its data striped across a
larger number of physical disk drives. For this option, the system drive specified must be the only system drive on the
pack of disk drives being migrated.
Add capacity input parameters and execution parameters are kept in NVRAM and COD. The process is restarted
automatically by the firmware after a power failure.
In the event that this process must be terminated (for example, two disk drives fail and cannot be recovered), the
controller automatically aborts the migration process.
Expanding a Logical Drive, Background initialization, Initialize system drive, Automatic rebuild, and Consistency
check are mutually exclusive operations. Only one process can run at a time.
No configuration update commands issued from the host are allowed during this process.
Write-back is disabled during the process but resumes at the end of the operation.
Removing and replacing a controller, during migration can result in data loss. A hardware error, which renders the
controller unusable or the NVRAM unreadable, also results in data loss during migration.
CAUTION:
It is highly recommended that you backup all of your data and your current configuration before
making modifications. See 5.11 Backing Up a Controller Configuration on page 107.
Follow these steps to perform a Logical Drive Expansion:
To expand a logical drive, the partner controller must be stopped. Click Controller -> Stop Partner Controller.
Note:
It may take a few minutes to stop the partner controller.
In the navigation area, select the logical drive that you need to expand.
Click Logical->Expand from the menu bar.
The Manual Storage Configuration: Expand Logical Drive window opens.
100
Spheras Storage Director Installation and User Guide
Advertisement
Table of Contents
