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Expanding datastore vsphere4

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cyr0n_k0r

Supreme [H]ardness
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I am really pleased with the new thin provisioning built into esx 4 that will allow me to finally thin provision my VM's without having to use an expensive SAN or anything.

I plan to buy (3) 300GB SAS drives for a new server and RAID-5 it. I plan to grow the storage over time eventually reaching (6) SAS drives. This would be a Dell PE R710 with a Perc 6/I.

My question is, how does esx 4 handle expanding storage. Lets say my 600gb are full and I want to add another drive. I know the RAID card does online capacity expansion, but how do I make esx aware of the new storage? In windows I would go to disk management and grow the partition.

Does esx require a reboot to expanding the local data store?
 
extents = bad, just create a new datastore and use svmotion to transfer the VM's over.
 
creating a new datastore for each new drive is dumb.
Hyper-V can do this easily by simply extending the partition to make contiguous space.

Why can't Vmware?
 
most vmware deployments are on san, in which case you can resize the lun and then resize the datastore. Ppl running vmware with das or other cheap storage option are sol :(
 
Local storage on the server is not "cheap" storage.
10k and 15k rpm SAS drives are also equally not "cheap" storage.

And if VMWare is so elitist that it won't give me features that have been built into windows since NT unless I run on $50,000 SAN units they can piss off.

Anyone have any actual constructive suggestions?
 
it's not elitist, it's enterprise IT.
extents are a bad idea because if you use them, and one of your LUN's goes down, the VM's on that VMFS volume are spread across multiple LUNs and there is a good chance you'll cause corruption.
based off your comments, this could be a bad thing if you're avoiding other "elitist" things like proper backups.
 
Datastore grow != extent. That's right folks - expand those luns and use grow now, it works, and it's safe.

Extents are bad, grow is good. Do it directly from a host if VC won't play ball.

edit: if it's a new lun, it's an extent. If it's space on an old lun, it's grow :)
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
Local storage on the server is not "cheap" storage.
10k and 15k rpm SAS drives are also equally not "cheap" storage.

And if VMWare is so elitist that it won't give me features that have been built into windows since NT unless I run on $50,000 SAN units they can piss off.

Anyone have any actual constructive suggestions?
Click to expand...

Local storage is cheap. A 50k san is also cheap, although less so.

A $4 million dollar DMX-4 is expensive. :)
 
lopoetve said:
Datastore grow != extent.
edit: if it's a new lun, it's an extent. If it's space on an old lun, it's grow :)
Click to expand...
Thank you! Can you link to a proper procedure to grow an existing data store?
I am using local storage attached directly to the server, not a LUN via iscsi or similar (not sure if you consider those to be different or not)

Edit: I found this :
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1009125
Would that be the recommended solution?

Edit2: The article says the purpose is to grow the datastore *after* the storage has been increased through the esx command line. Are the commands between Step 1 through 7 the ESX command lines it's referring to? Once these commands have been entered is there anything that needs to be done inside the VI client?

Also, (and this is a biggie) is a reboot required in any stage of growing the datastore?
 
Last edited:
A lun is a logical unit - it can come from anywhere :) Your PERC card presents multiple targets each with LUN0 by default.

There's a FAR easier way than that - increase the size of the logical volume, hit properties on the datastore (configuration -> storage -> datastore -> properties), and hit "increase size"

badaboom! Done!
 
hmm manually resizing partions, looks like it would work, but i hope you have a backup if things go very wrong.
 
Wow! Is a reboot required in any stage of that?
Does Dell have openmanage linux support for ESX?
 
lopoetve said:
A lun is a logical unit - it can come from anywhere :) Your PERC card presents multiple targets each with LUN0 by default.

There's a FAR easier way than that - increase the size of the logical volume, hit properties on the datastore (configuration -> storage -> datastore -> properties), and hit "increase size"

badaboom! Done!
Click to expand...

that actually didn't work when i tried it on adaptec 5805 card. I resized teh size of the volume waited for the card to finish the operation then esx would report that the disk is bigger but clicking increase storage resulted in empty "Select a lun ..." screen.

cyr0n_k0r said:
Does Dell have openmanage linux support for ESX?
Click to expand...

yes there is an agent rpm you can install on esx for openmanage.
 
axan said:
that actually didn't work when i tried it on adaptec 5805 card. I resized teh size of the volume waited for the card to finish the operation then esx would report that the disk is bigger but clicking increase storage resulted in empty "Select a lun ..." screen.



yes there is an agent rpm you can install on esx for openmanage.
Click to expand...

don't use VC for it - connect to a host with the client as root, and do it that way :)
 
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