2 Posts
0
532
Dell Perc 710 Virtual Disc deletion for array expansion
Hi all, I am hoping for a little guidance. I am an admin for a companies older 2012 R2 file server, their main Raid 5 array is running out of space, so a couple of 1tb drives have been purchased and installed and ready for allocation.
My issue is there is no reconfigure option for that array in Openmanage. I see it as an option for the C drive, but not this raid 5 array. After doing a little research, it seems the array is sliced.
There is a D drive with the 1.8TB, their primary storage, and an E drive with a 18 gb or something. So two virtual disks using the same 3 drives from the raid 5 array.
I need to expand this array, its a production server so I cant mess this up. The smaller E drive is unused, so I am ok to delete the virtual disk (2).
My question is am i good to delete this second virtual disk without its affecting the primary 1.8TB Virtual Disk (1)? And will doing so, allow the reconfigure option to be visible for that raid 5 array allowing it to be expanded?
I have seen a few (very old) posts saying the whole array needs deleted and recreated. I am hoping this is not the case as its really not feasible, and i can simply delete the the E drive vdisk without any data loss or downtime. I am new to Dell stuff, been working on HP ecosystem for a while, so any guidance form those who have done this before would be greatly appreciated
DELL-Charles R
Moderator
Moderator
•
3.9K Posts
0
December 21st, 2021 13:00
Hello tripski,
While all this should be able to complete without losing data; It is always recommended to have a validated backup.
Once you delete the E: and delete the unused virtual disk2, then you should be able to use Windows Disk Management to extend to the Unallocated space. Extend a basic volume : https://dell.to/3qi4u7q
Remember there is a 2TB limit on Basic disk. To convert to GPT with Windows Disk Management would require backing up all data and then you can convert.
Then when the array is not sliced anymore you should be able to Reconfigure to add the hard drives to the virtual disk.
Reconfigure page 168 : https://dell.to/32hqBCW
tripski
2 Posts
0
January 6th, 2022 10:00
Marking this as solved, this does accomplish the first part of getting the array to expand, converting MBR to GPT without data loss on a Raid 5 aray is a whole other set of problems. But this should accomplish the initial part of the process.