PowerEdge 1750 & PowerVault 220s - Expand Raid? 1

[beerhunter2]

I have a Dell PowerEdge 1750 configured with Raid 1 internally. This contains OS partition. The PowerEdge PERC 3Di raid controller is also connected externally to a PowerVault 220s. This is currently configured with Raid 5 (4 disks).

I wanted to add another disk to the Raid 5 array, but Dell support told me they don't support it with this configuration. They did tell me that there are some 3rd party utilities that would allow me to expand my Raid 5 partition.

Dell told me that Microsoft had a free utility. I did a search on Microsoft's web site, and all I could find was Diskpart.exe. I assume this is the utility Dell was talking about. I did try it, but it would not allow me to Extend the partition to the extra drive.

In Windows Disk Manager, both the existing partition and the newly added disk state that they are Basic. Don't know if they both should be set to Dynamic or not, or if this would make a difference with the Diskpart.exe utility.

Does anyone know how I can accomplish this without wiping out the current disk array and starting from scratch?

Any 3rd party utilities that you would recommend?

Help! I've fallen and I can't reach my beer.

 

[NickFerrar]

How much have you configured so far? First step is to add the drives into the array, once this is done you should see a chunk of unallocated space in Windows. From there jsut run diskpart, then list volumes and select the volume you want to extend then run the extend command. I did it a couple of days ago on a client system, took about 3 seconds to extend a 70GB RAID-5 array to a 130GB one.
Only hassles I had were: needed to update the ESM, PERC firmware, BIOS and Windows RAID drivers first so the new drives were available to be added within Array Manager (not sure which upgrade fixes it but best to do them all at once anyway). Then running diskpart I got the error "failed to initialise disk management", I remembered Array Manager takes over disk managment when installed so I uninstalled it and diskpart worked fine then.

If you've converted a basic disk to a dynamic disk I think you're stuck and need to wipe and restore (I need to do this on another sever in a couple of weeks ). From what I've seen all 3rd party utilities have this limitation (Volume Manager is the most often used I think but it's like $600 a copy).

 

[beerhunter2]

Thanks for the response NickFerrar.

My problem is the first step you mention. I am not able to add the new drive into the array. I know that the PERC firmware is out of date, so maybe I need to upgrade all those items you mentioned for this to work.

I imagine that all the upgrades need to occur while offline?

Help! I've fallen and I can't reach my beer.

 

[NickFerrar]

Ok first off plug the disks in, you should see them detected within Array Manager, if not they may be faulty but it could still be firmware related I guess.
Secondly if you can see them showing and you go to Add Member and the new disks don't show as available that's the problem I had which was solved by updates.

The order I applied updates was:
PERC firmware
ESM
BIOS
PERC Windows Driver

Dell now do Windows update packages for systems so you can run the update then do a reboot and it gets applied (previously you had to create floppies and boot off them etc.). So you'll need to schedule downtime for the few reboots, to expand a 70GB containter to a 130GB one took me about 2.5 hours start to finish including verifying the overnight backup was good etc. About an hour of that time was doing the PERC level RAID expansion, the rest mostly waiting 5-10 mintues for each reboot. Personally if I were you I'd allocate an entire weekend of downtime to give you a restore window should the worst case happen. In theory though you should be able to get away with a 3-4 hour downtime window.

 

[beerhunter2]

Thanks Nick,
I can see the disk has been detected within Array Manager (at <ctrl><M> on boot up). The option to "Add Member" does not exist (or I can not find it).

Tried to install the PERC Windows Driver, but it came back and told me that my PERC firmware version was too old. Looks like I'll need to apply all of the updates first. Thanks for the order by the way.

Haven't had a weekend off since the beginning of the year, and this Sunday is the SuperBowl, so I think I will be putting off this upgrade until the following weekend. I'll let you know how it turns out then.

Help! I've fallen and I can't reach my beer.

 

[NickFerrar]

It's been a while since I did it at the PERC BIOS level, I think the option then was 'reconfigure container' or something. If you have Array Manager installed in Windows though just go into that, expand the Arrays folder then expand the PERC folder and expand the Array Groups, you should then see your virtual disks (should have 2 in your case), right-click the correct one and you should see "Add Member" as an option. When you go into this you should see two tables, left one being disks available to add and the right one being disks you've selected to be added. The right one should be blank at first but the left table should show the 2 new disks (if not that's when you need to do the firmware updates). If they do show up there already just select them and click add disk, I found the RAID type got blanked out when I did this so change it back to RAID-5 then OK it and the expansion process starts (the less disk I/O going on at this stage the better so make sure users aren't connected).

As I mentioned in my first post though if you have Array Manager installed you can't run diskpart which is what allows you to extend the D: volume within Windows once the hardware expansion of the RAID array completes so you'll need to uninstall Array Manager before that stage. I haven't reinstalled it yet on the system I did last weekend, I'm not anticipating it would cause a problem though as once diskpart has run and done it's job it shouldn't need to be in a working state after.

 

[eastbr]

I have a Dell PowerEdge 2550 running out of space on the C: drive. It has a PERC 3/Di RAID controller configured in RAID1 with (2) 18GB hard drives.

Was told by Dell that I could add a drive and change the configuration to RAID5 on the RAID controller. If I do that will I lose all my data and configuration on the server? If so does anyone have any other suggestions of how to increase my storage without losing data?

 

[NickFerrar]

Assuming RAID-1 to RAID-5 conversion doesn't lose data I can't see how you'd expand the system volume in Windows (without using a 3rd party tool and even quite a few of those have system partition limitations).
If I run short on C: disk space I first move the pagefile ot a different volume then I'll look at stuff like backup software to see where the logs are being written to (ARCserve for example can take several GB). If it's a Terminal Server and your users have large roaming profiles you can also look at stuff like moving "Documents and Settings" to another volume (needs a registry key change though, don't jsut drag and drop ).

 

[beerhunter2]

NickFerrar
Super Star
Thanks for all your help, and step by step instructions. It worked just like you said it would, with the exception that it took me about 12 hours to expand a 200GB container to 270GB. Granted that the 200GB conatiner only had about 12GB remaining, so that may have contributed to the extra time.

Help! I've fallen and I can't reach my beer.