UCS B series drive space increase

[joeharb]

We have a raid 1 with 2 drives in a b series server and have purchase 2 larger drives. Is the process as simple as pulling one drive and letting it rebuild then replacing second. Once the raid is healthy extending space. The OS is windows installed on the blade. 

Thanks,

Joe

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

I don't believe the standard raid controllers in the blades support VD expansion.

I have written a couple of posts on how to do that with the rack server's raid controllers.

You can replace a smaller drive with a larger capacity drive, but the VD size remains the same.

You may need to recreate the VD (data destructive) once the larger drives are installed.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[joeharb]

The controller in the system is:

LSI MegaRAID SAS 2004 ROMB

I am pretty sure I can get to the Webios on the system...once the VD has been recreated on both new drives would it be possible to increase VD side form Webios?

Thanks,

Joe

[Kirk J]

When you recreate the VDs, after the larger drives have been inserted, it should let you create a VD that consumes full space on the drives. 

Alternatively, if you have been using local disk policy to provision local storage on the blades to begin with:

• Unassociate service profile
• uncheck the 'protect' flag in the local disk policy (if enabled)
• decommission the blade,
• replace both drives with larger drives,
• change the local disk policy back to enable 'protect' again
• Re-ack the blade
• Re-associate the service profile (this should recreate the mirror using all the space of the larger drives)

While seemingly longer set of steps, I would opt for the 2nd process, as you are generally better off with letting the service profile provision the raid.

Thanks,

Kirk...

(note, this process removes the existing raid volume/VD, and recreates a larger one.  You will need to reinstall OS & data)