If you’re like me you don’t allocate all disks to a SAN out of the gate. I like to keep a little in reserve so I can add capacity when needed. Then, once all the disks are added I’ll usually pickup a couple more disks and keep those in reserve. In either case once it comes time to add capacity to a virtual disk on a Dell MD 3000i SAN it can be a little tricky.
This will be accomplished in two steps. First add the capacity of one or more physical disks to a disk group. Next expand the virtual disk. The first step is rather easy and done through the Modular Disk Storage Manager utility. Step two is a little tricky as it uses the Dell smcli command line utility.
Step 1 – add one or more drives to a Disk Group
- Open the Dell Modular Disk Storage Manager utility
- Click the Modify tab
- Under the Storage subsection click Add Free Capacity (Physical Disks)
- Select your disk group, click next
- Select the capacity/number of disks, click finish
Step 2- Expanding a Virtual Disk
- Decide how much space to add in Bytes. You could use a calculator such as this or this bit calculator.
- On the computer running Dell Modular Disk Storage Manger, open a command prompt.
- Navigate to Program FilesDellMD Storage Managerclient OR Program Files (x86)DellMD Storage Managerclient if you are on a 64 bit machine.
- Use the smcli command to expand the disk. Examples below.
- MD3000i named SAN1
- Virtual Disk named Disk1
- Want to add 500GB to virtual disk
smcli -n SAN1 -c "set virtualdisk ["Data1"] addCapacity=536870912000;"
While this expands the capacity of the SAN virtual disk the operating system may not automatically recognize it. On Windows 2008 server perform the following:
- Open Server Manager
- Go to Storage, Disk Management
- Right-click the desired Windows volume and select Expand Volume
- Follow the prompts in the Extend Volume Wizard
I am getting an error:
Encountered "" at line 1, column 66.
Was expecting one of:
"physicalDisks" …
"userLabel" …
"cacheFlushModifier" …
"cacheWithoutBatteryEnabled" …
"KB" …
"MB" …
"GB" …
"Bytes" …
"TB" …
"mediaScanEnabled" …
"mirrorEnabled" …
"mirrorCacheEnabled" …
"owner" …
"consistencyCheckEnabled" …
"readCacheEnabled" …
"cacheReadPrefetch" …
"readAheadMultiplier" …
"segmentSize" …
"modificationPriority" …
"writeCacheEnabled" …
"repositoryFullPolicy" …
"warningThresholdPercent" …
"logicalUnitNumber" …
"role" …
"force" …
"addPhysicalDisks" …
"addCapacity" …
"enclosureLossProtect" …
"forceMultipleMapping" …
"preReadRedundancyCheck" …
";" …
SMcli failed.
Any ideas?