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1508
July 26th, 2016 10:00
Adding unconfigured disks to an existing pool currently in production
I have added 7 additional disks to an existing DAE plus 1 additional DAE with 12 drives in a VNXe3150 dual SP configuration. It is my understanding that I need to go into Unisphere under VNXe, System, Storage Pools in order to add these unconfigured drives to the pool I want and to be sure to add them as RAID 5 (4+1), which is the way these pools are currently configured. I see there are two ways of doing it: Automatic (let Unisphere decide how to add the 15 disks and 2 spares we'll need and then Manual (I choose how to allocate the drives).
Question #1 Is there a reason to do automatic over manual configuration other than Unisphere decides which drives to use as Hot Spares and which drives to use in your Performance pool?
Question #2 When I add these drives, is there any reason not to do it while they are in production (will it have any adverse affect on my users during the workday when I add the drives to the pool?
Question #3 After I add them to the approrpriate pool, where is it that you configure the LUNS? I am using these in a vmware esxi environment. Will it be apparent to me once I add them to the pool?
Thanks in advance for any good tips, as I am new to this task.
joneschik
6 Posts
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July 27th, 2016 07:00
Thank you for the info. I did use the Automatic option, which did add 15 disks to the “Performance” pool and added 2 disks to “Hot Spares”. As you said, there was no noticeable performance hit & I didn’t hear any complaints from our connected users. It took about 40 minutes to configure the drives.
I did create a new datastore under “VMWare” successfully.
kelleg
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August 2nd, 2016 09:00
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glen
SteveK821
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149 Posts
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July 27th, 2016 06:00
Hi,
there is no real advantage in using manual selection for a small configuration with just one pool. I think the wizard will only let you add disks with the same RAID config as the existing pool, so you will probably only have the option to add 5, 10 or 15 disks.
The expansion won't have any impact on availability. It may slightly affect performance during the expansion of the pool, but usually Host I/O has priority over expansion.
Since you are configuring ESX datastores, you should select VMware in the Storage Menu. You can create your new datastores there. You will probably see your existing datastores there already.
Regards,
Stephen