Expanding Mass Storage

[Horpel]

I am about to expand our storage, which means that several servers will be down due to re-RAID of our storage blade.

I'll be performing this task in the evening, but I am concerned with the amount of time these services will be down and want to have them back up by morning.

I'm using the HP Smart Start array utility to create a new RAID with twice as many disks (6x900GB).

A couple of days ago, I performed the same process on mirrored drives for an ESXi install (2x300GB).

After I created the new RAID, it appeared there were no more steps.  It was ready for the ESXi installation.

This seemed odd to me that the disks were prepped so quickly in the new RAID configuration.

So what I'm trying to understand here, is what HP's utility must perform in order to make a RAID functional for use in the ESXi environment.

Is there no disk processing/formatting that needs to be done before these volumes can be used by ESXi or a VM?

It appears that a virtual volume doesn't require to be "formatted' until it's allocated for use with a VM, and then the disk will be formatted by the VM's OS into a form

that is accessible, like NTFS.

So when I create this new RAID across 6 drives, is this going to happen almost instantaneously?

Or was a blind to the fact that there was actually some processing going on by HP's utility and I just happened to time the install of ESXi perfectly as it finished?

Once again, I'm concerned about Downtime.  I'm hoping it doesn't require 24 hours to configure a RAID across 6 disks.

Any ideas on this are appreciated.

[JarryG]

Creating new raid-array is not "expanding" in the sense of raid-array. Only some meta-data are written, so it is quite fast. But if you want really expand array (add new disks to existing array, and keep data you have on raid-array while expanding), this might take a few hours, or even days (depending on controller, array-type, i/o-load, size/number of disks, etc).

But you can still use array even if re-sync/expanding is going on in the background (or at least it was so with my LSI raid-controller)...

[Horpel]

thanks for your reply.

I suppose I miscommunicated about "expansion."

HP claims that I will not be able to preserve the data if I use the Smart Start CD, so it will be a brand new array including all 6 disks.

I'll have to back up all of the existing data first.

If I'm wrong and data can indeed remain in tact, I'm all ears.

It would make me extremely happy to find out that this is possible.