ESXI - Expanding Datastore

[glennda]

Has anybody been able to do this?

 

I've added the extra disks and expanded the raid array on the physical machine (5 days ago). In ESXI (4.1.0) it doesn't see the additional storage available - an extra 2 x 146GB drives in a raid 5 array.

 

I tried following the guide here but neither the Storage Adapter nor the Expand option is seeing the additional space.

 

Any ideas?

[apaton]

Has anybody been able to do this?

 

I've added the extra disks and expanded the raid array on the physical machine (5 days ago). In ESXI (4.1.0) it doesn't see the additional storage available - an extra 2 x 146GB drives in a raid 5 array.

 

I tried following the guide here but neither the Storage Adapter nor the Expand option is seeing the additional space.

 

Any ideas?

 

What storage are you using?

 

Possibly you have expanded the storage array but not the Volume/LUN. Typically P2000/Dot Hill/Dell MD/NetApp/LSI all run volumes/LUN's on top of Arrays Group ie RAID5/RAID10, different vendors use different terms.

 

So once you have increased the size of the Volume/LUN you typically then ask vSphere ESX to rescan the HBA (iSCSI/FC), Via Configuration/Storage Adaptors tab. You should see the size of the target LUN along with path identifiers at the bottom of the screen.

 

Once done then follow the procedure per VMware knowlegebase guide.

 

HTH

 

Andy

[glennda]

It's a small company I was doing it for so just local storage.

 

 

From what I have read later is that due to ESXI putting additional partitions (fat 16) after the datastore parition it is unable to expand the datastore partition into the extra space.

 

If however ESXI was installed to usb/sd card and the only partition was the datastore on that volume it would be able to expand itself.

 

I've had to put a temp server in there and Veeam Replicate the VM's to that while I rebuild there other one with a large enough array to install the View Server Required!

[PotNoodleTech]

Is the datastore you are trying to use/expand installed on the same disks / raid group as ESXi? ALWAYS keep the VM datastores completely seperate from the ESXi installation as if the installation lunches itself or an upgrade goes wrong you'll have to format the esxi partition during reinstall and thus you'll also format the datastore you are using losing your VMs.

 

Also, if your formatted your datastore using VMFS3 and only used 1MB block size you cant physically have a datastore fize size greater than 256GB anyway, if you used 2MB block size you would be able to have a datastotre file up to 512GB etc.

 

This would involve downtime, but you could use VEEAM free edition to drag all the VMs off the host and then reconfigure your raid array how you want it and recreate the datastore using the block size thjat suits, and then use VEEAM again to drag all the VMs back onto your new datastore?

[glennda]

Is the datastore you are trying to use/expand installed on the same disks / raid group as ESXi? ALWAYS keep the VM datastores completely seperate from the ESXi installation as if the installation lunches itself or an upgrade goes wrong you'll have to format the esxi partition during reinstall and thus you'll also format the datastore you are using losing your VMs.

 

Also, if your formatted your datastore using VMFS3 and only used 1MB block size you cant physically have a datastore fize size greater than 256GB anyway, if you used 2MB block size you would be able to have a datastotre file up to 512GB etc.

 

This would involve downtime, but you could use VEEAM free edition to drag all the VMs off the host and then reconfigure your raid array how you want it and recreate the datastore using the block size thjat suits, and then use VEEAM again to drag all the VMs back onto your new datastore?

 

I had to rebuild in the end - wasn't too bad - veeam replicated the vm's off and booted on a donor server and in the process or veeaming the back. I didn't setup the server in the first place - now ESXI is on an SD card inside.

[PotNoodleTech]

Ah cool. Good work.

 

And yes ESXi on SD card is amazeballs. No more wasting valuable hard drive space for us!