Previous: How to add space to an HP StoreVirtual Virtual SAN Appliance – PART I
In our previous article, we got a lot accomplished.
- We added hard drives to both of our servers.
- We prepared our existing virtual environment for maintenance.
- We then booted into HP Intelligent Provisioning and created a logical RAID 5 array.
- We created an exclusive datastore in VCenter for the VSAs.
- We added all that datastore space as virtual disks to the VSA virtual machines.
We are now ready for these new disks to be provisioned in the HP Management Console. Part II leads off with Step 6.
Step 6 – Provision storage in HP StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console
With both VSAs now provisioned with additional virtual disks, we now need to add those disks into our virtual shared storage SAN. To do this:
Open the HP StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console.
Right-click on the name of your Management Group and select Login to Management Group from the context menu.
Provide your credentials and click Login.
Expand the cluster. Expand Storage Systems. Expand the name of the VSA. Select Storage. Select the Disk Setup tab.
In this view, you will see two uninitialized disks. Select the first disk, right-click and pick Add Disk to RAID. Repeat for the second disk. Repeat these steps for the second VSA.
Step 7 – Create a new LUN
With the Centralized Management Console recognizing all the new disks, it is time to create a new LUN. While still logged into the CMC do the following:
Right-click Volumes and Snapshots and select New Volume from the context menu.
Enter a Volume Name and Description.
Refer to the Cluster Available Space box. This should show our combined space from the 2 disks, which should be around 2.4TB after overhead. Even though were limited by VMware by only added 2TB disks to the VSA, the LUN we create can use the space from all available disks.
In the Reported Size box, enter as much space as possible as we won’t be using any snapshots.
Select the Assign or Unassign Servers…. button.
Under the Assigned column, select both ESXi hosts. Make sure the permissions for both are Read/Write and click Ok.
You will receive a warning regarding assigning multiple servers to a LUN. Our servers are a cluster in VMware so we can click Continue to acknowledge this warning.
Select the Advanced tab.
Under the Data Protection Level drop-down box select Network RAID-10 (2-way mirror). This is the setting that mirrors the data between the two hosts.
Warning: Do NOT select Network RAID-0 (None) as this offers no fault tolerance and losing anyone host would take down the entire LUN (very bad).
Keep the radio buttons on Primary for Type and Full for Provisioning. Click the Ok button.
The new LUN will use the existing iSCSI target so at this point all our configuration in the CMC is complete. Time to switch back to the vSphere Client.
Step 8 – Add the VSA LUN to VMware
To add the new Shared Storage LUN back into VCenter complete the following steps:
Select either of the ESXi hosts and click the Configuration tab. Select Storage Adapters. Select the Rescan All… link in the top right of the right pane.
Click Ok on the Rescan dialog box, leaving both checkboxes selected by default. Two LEFTHAND iSCSI Disks will now show under the Details pane. Select Storage. Select the Add Storage… link in the top right of the right pane.
On the first page of the Add Storage dialog box, leave Disk LUN selected by default and click Next. On the next page select the LEFTHAND iSCSI Disk with a size around 2.4TB. Click Next. Leave VMFS-5 selected and click Next. Click Next again.
This is our new Virtual Machines datastore so, we need to distinguish it from the preliminary datastore we created that hosts the VSA disks. Let’s call this datastore “Virtual Machines” and click Next. Select Maximum Available Space and click Next. Click the Finish button. The datastore is now ready for Virtual Machines!
I hope this article was of great help to you. It was entirely in response to the complete lack of guides currently posted out their regarding this process. There were many guides on how to do the initial setup, but none that explained the process of adding additional storage to a Virtual SAN already in production. The only thing I could find was in the User Guide and that only covered the process in Step 6 of our article. This seemed odd to me as I have now done this process twice in just the last year. I have to assume others are having equal difficulty looking for this process as well.
I would love to hear from your experiences with this process so please leave a comment!
Booker Masambaji says
Hi Gareth,
This is a great article, The steps are very clear and easy to follow. But i thought that,if i had already configured raid10 while creating the logical volumes do i really need it also in CMC? i think having Network RAID-0 (None) at CMC level is ok.
All in all, it is a good article.
Regards
Booker
Gareth Gudger says
Good afternoon Booker,
Unfortunately, I haven’t touched one of these since I wrote the article 4 years ago (I primarily do Exchange and Office 365 these days). If memory serves though you would want network RAID 10 so it would keep the virtual SAN up and running in the event on of the hosts went down. I believe that if one of the hosts in your VSA went down with network RAID 0 it would take the entire VSA offline.
Francesco says
Hi Gareth, I don’t understand the reason why for adding storage to an existent StoreVirtual VSA, you create a new RAID and so on with the rest… Isn’t it simpler to expand the existent RAID volume, and add SCSI vDisk 1:n to the VSA VMs?
Thank you,
Francesco
Francesco says
I found this article in my bookmarks because I have to do this exact activity in my environment… Ahah 🙂 I confirm that official documentations lacks of many steps needed to perform this task, so this guide is absolutely precious! Thank you. And, to answer to Francesco’s previous post (that is me again LoL), I have to teach him that you cannot expand a physical existent raid with a bunch of disks that are different from those already installed in the host. So you have to setup a new raid set and than perform all the other steps. 😛 Bye Gareth!