Larry Heimendinger
asked on
Expanding drive space on Dell server with PERC 6i RAID controller
The server is a Dell R710 with eight physical drives. Two are configured for the virtual OS and six for the second drive.
Each disk one at a time, was swapped from 300GB to 900GB and the RAID rebuilt before doing the next one.
The question is how to expand the space in the virtual drives without loosing the data, if that is possible. I recall, maybe incorrectly or inaccurately, that in the controller boot it was possible to alter the virtual disk sizes but then NOT initialize them thus keeping the data but getting full use of the data there.
If that is possible, how do you do it?
Restoring the second drive is not really a big deal, just takes forever....
The OS drive is another matter and i do not wish to risk a bare metal restore. Just saying....
So here is an alternative thought for the C: virtual disk. What if I create a new virtual disk in the now unused space, then bind that to the original C: as a shared space? I am thinking that is just not possible on the system disk. But maybe there is a way..
Any suggestions much appreciated!!!!
Each disk one at a time, was swapped from 300GB to 900GB and the RAID rebuilt before doing the next one.
The question is how to expand the space in the virtual drives without loosing the data, if that is possible. I recall, maybe incorrectly or inaccurately, that in the controller boot it was possible to alter the virtual disk sizes but then NOT initialize them thus keeping the data but getting full use of the data there.
If that is possible, how do you do it?
Restoring the second drive is not really a big deal, just takes forever....
The OS drive is another matter and i do not wish to risk a bare metal restore. Just saying....
So here is an alternative thought for the C: virtual disk. What if I create a new virtual disk in the now unused space, then bind that to the original C: as a shared space? I am thinking that is just not possible on the system disk. But maybe there is a way..
Any suggestions much appreciated!!!!
Thomas Zucker-Scharff
I had a different scenario, but the solution could be the same. For my configuration I had 3 physical disks, RAID 5, PERC. I had a logical drive for the boot drove and the rest of the space was allotted as data space. I used a repartioning s/w to expand the servers' boot partition. (Paragon, but you can use something else)
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I used this on a poweredge server with raid5 and perc6.
I used this on a poweredge server with raid5 and perc6.
ASKER
PowerdgeTech, thanks for the more thorough explanation. I agree with you that Thomas describes increasing the size of the partition from with the OS, not increasing the size of the RAID virtual disk. I just updated the firmware on PERC 6i hoping some magic would appear. No such luck.
Any suggestions on imagining software to do a quicker save and recovery rather than using Windows Server backup for doing it? I always get nervous on bare metal restores from server backups.
Any suggestions on imagining software to do a quicker save and recovery rather than using Windows Server backup for doing it? I always get nervous on bare metal restores from server backups.
ASKER
Dell should have long ago made this possible....
For Imaging software, I use paragon as well, and have never had a problem. I usually do a full image backup before such a task as well as a file by file backup. The instance I referred to was indeed with partitions, not VMs. Paragon does do an excellent full metal backup/restore.
Dell should have long ago made this possible....They did ... 8 years ago. The PERC 6 was released in 2007 and was only an incremental update to the PERC 5 (2006) ... it is aged technology by now. It just happened to be a legacy option for the R710 after the R710 was released. The R710 is/was also configurable with the H700, which does support this feature (and more).
ASKER
Solved my problem by replacing PERC 6/i with H700, posted step by step in another thread.
It was easy generally speaking with no data loss.
It was easy generally speaking with no data loss.