As your system performance and disk space capacity needs grow, the
DSMS solution can be expanded to add new physical disks, storage enclosures,
and servers to fulfill these needs. There are three different types
of expansions to an existing DSMS solution:
- Adding new physical disks to existing storage enclosures
to increase the usable capacity or performance of the solution.
- Adding a new storage enclosure to increase the usable
capacity or performance of the solution.
- Adding a new server to provide additional scale-out
capability for new file shares (Scale-Out File Server solutions) or
provide additional compute capacity (Converged solutions).
These step-by-step instructions provide a
method to expand the capacity in each of these three scenarios. Each
of these expansion scenarios can be completed while the existing cluster
and storage remains online, when data paths remain available to all
enclosures throughout the procedure.
-
NOTE: If you want to perform
an offline upgrade during any of these procedures, you must turn off
an existing storage enclosure with virtual disks. Prior to turning
off the enclosure, set the
RetireMissingPhysicalDisksPolicy to
Never for the affected storage pools. Ensure
that you set it to the original setting after the procedure is complete
and the enclosure is turned on.
Dell recommends
that, when expanding a storage pool, you must add physical disks in
a quantity equal to the column count of the largest virtual disk multiplied
by the number of data copies, plus any additional physical disks required
for automatic rebuilds. For example, for a two-way mirror virtual
disk, if the column count is four, you must add a minimum of eight
physical disks to the pool to expand the virtual disk.
When expanding existing or creating new virtual disks
that have enclosure awareness enabled, there are additional considerations
that must be taken into account. Enclosure awareness spreads the data
copies of virtual disks across three or more storage enclosures. However,
when you are adding new physical disks or storage enclosures, on the
basis of existing virtual disk layout, virtual disks created on the
newly added physical disk space may not be enclosure aware. This can
occur if there is not sufficient free disk space, or if the physical
disks are not distributed properly to spread the new data copies in
a method, which satisfies the enclosure awareness requirements.
-
NOTE: All the documents
referred in the following tasks are available at
Dell.com/dsmsmanuals.