What are the best practices to manage a volume that is mounted to a VMware system?

Article ID: 892

Last updated: 12 Nov, 2009

Problem:

I would like to know what are the best practices for volume management, specifically, increasing the size of a volume dynamically. Are there required disaster recovery precautions to take?

For example; If I have a 150GB volume and inside this volume I have a virtual machine with its virtual disks and one of those disks is out of space, and If the volume was not sized for this expansion. Can I go to volume manager and choose the LUN I want to modify? Is this safe to do while the VM is online and any value that I input as disk space adds to the current correct, with my 150GB volume, if I choose 50GB, I will then end up with a 200 GB volume correct?

Solution:

With DSS V6 with the SCST iSCSI Target Solution you can expand your iSCSI Target from 150GB to an additional 50GB without interruption. All you have to do is go to the GUI in CONFIGURATION -> volume manager -> vg[xx] -> Function: Volume manager then use the pull down "Action" button and use the "Modify LV000x" then specify the added size. If you are replicating you will have to stop the replication on both ends then add the size then start the replication again from here and in the task of the Volume Replication section of the GUI.

Also we only have test with DSS V6 and VMware 4.0 using this method. VMware will see the added size and you will need to use the tools in VMware to add the additional size to the VMware Modifying VMFS Datastore Properties then add the size to the virtual machine. You can do all this without taking down the VM. In other steps that are involved with VMware please consult the VMware manual for further instructions.