ESXi Datastore and Virtual Disk Questions

[PiERiT]

I'm managing an ESXi 5.1 box that has two RAID5 virtual disks. One is empty, the other has a VMFS5 datastore using the entirety of the space. I want to expand that datastore to utilize the space on the empty virtual disk, but don't know the best way of doing that.

1. vSphere will let me expand it the way it's currently configured, leaving me with a single datastore spanning two virtual disks. Is that a good idea, or would it be detrimental to performance? Can it be done live?
2. If that's a bad idea or can't be done live, can I delete the empty virtual disk, add the drives to the other array, then expand the datastore? Can that be done live?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

 

[bigdogchris]

You'll probably have to delete the second VD and expand the original one onto the new disk.

Also check this out about expanding a datastore across volumes.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/498691

 

[t_ski]

What about a datastore cluster and configuring it with Storage DRS?

 

[tporter]

You would essentially be striping 2 raid5s together. striping is nit usually recommended in business environments although each half of the stripe would still have redundancy from raid5... honestly, you best option would be to back up the current data on the used raid 5 and then reconfigure all your disks to use raid 6. This will provide the same amount of storage as your striped raid5, provide a slight boost in performance from better paritying (if that's a word), and provide better fault tolerance as you could have 2 disk fail anywhere in the raid6 as apposed to possibly being down if 2 drives failed in the same raid5 array. I believe raid 6 is pretty much the standard now unless you have the funds for raid10 or better in a corporate envirinment...