Windows 2003 extend metavolume or dynamic disk

i try to stay way from dynamic disk as far as possible. Is your metavolume concatenated ?, if yes than you can add another meta member and use diskpart on the host to extend the basic volume. If your meta is striped you will need to use a BCV (real BCV, not RAID-5) to protect your data while you are adding another meta member. If you search Symmetrix forum for "extending meta" string ..you will find a couple of discussions.

i had an instance where i rebooted a system and for no apparent reason the drive would go offline and i had to manually bring it back online, also you can't use them as MS Cluster resources.

"i try to stay way from dynamic disk as far as possible."

How come? Have you had some bad experiences you can share?

As long as you are not using MSCS, I think dynamic disk is much easier and flexible option.
But if you have to use basic disk(like in MSCS environment), since Windows 2003 support dynamic disk resizing, so it's also doable by extend meta volume from Symmetrix (if you are using striped meta volume, you will need BCV to prevent data loss). After increase meta volume, Windows SA will have to run diskpart CLI to expand disk to utilize the increase capacity, it can't be done from Windows Disk Management GUI.

As someone that supports Windows disks on EMC SAN storage for a living, I would highly advise against using dynamic disks whenever possible. In the long term, dynamic disks will cause you much more trouble than they are worth.

Dynamic disks on SANs are susceptible to issues, especially on a DMX where a VCM device is presented to all nodes connecting to an FA port. If someone accidentally makes the VCM device a dynamic disk, this will potentially affect all Windows hosts connecting to the same FA port that use dynamic disks.

For most cases where dynamic disks mysteriously go missing or failed, you will need to engage Microsoft support to resolve these issues

Personally, I would never recommend using dynamic disks. Expanding disks on the Symm is easy enough, and using diskpart to extend a filesystem is now very reliable (wasn't always the case).

My $0.02

I am a former Windows system admin who is now working full time as storage admin. We have been using Dynamic disk whenever possible in our environment since Windows 2000 and we never had a single issue direclty related to that.

We have used Dynamic disks to mirror,copy, expand partitions etc. We use them a lot and never experienced any problems with them.

I am also curious to hear what are the bad stories about them.

Thanks