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Adding drives to a Dell MD1000 storage array


We recently bought a Dell MD1000 storage array (to go with our Dell PowerEdge 2900) with 5TB of space. We’re running Ubuntu (I prefer plain old Debian…. but oh well…).

They say these things are expandable up to 45TB (all on a single virtual disk)… I wanted to make sure it’s really possible! Here’s how I did it:

I ended up using the Dell Open Manage command line interface as I couldn’t get the OpenManage web interface working with Ubuntu. I presume there’s something similar with the Windows install of OpenManager.

See this post to install Dell OSMA and open the manual for the omreport and omconfig commands.

  1. display the current controllers:

    omreport storage controller
  2. display the current physical disk status:

    omreport storage pdisk controller=1
  3. display the current virtual disk status:

    omreport storage vdisk
  4. insert the new drive (and take note of the bay number)
  5. reconfigure the virtual disk with the new drive

    omconfig storage vdisk action=reconfigure controller=1 vdisk=0 raid=r5 adisk=0:0:9,0:0:10,0:0:11,0:0:12,0:0:13,0:0:14

    where 0:0:9 was the new drive and 0:0:10,0:0:11,0:0:12,0:0:13,0:0:14 were the existing ones.
  6. check if it’s finished reconstructing with

    omreport storage vdisk
  7. wait….. wait….. go home…. come back….
  8. resize the partition and file system in your operating system.For me, this involved using LVM tools to resize the partition, then resize2fs to resize the ext3 filesystem

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This entry was posted on February 26, 2009, 6:11 pm and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. #1 by wilson on March 3, 2009 - 11:46 am

    Just in case anyone else is using a Linux variation an wants to see how I did step 8:

    1. Resize the Physical volume:

      pvresize /dev/sdb
    2. Check if the physical volume is the right size

      pvdisplay

      This step showed that my LVM physical volume hadn’t changed. I think this is because the megaraid driver hadn’t realised the underlying drive had changed size. To fix this, I restarted the box and resized the physical volume again. There are probably better ways to get megaraid re-scan the drive (i.e. reloading the module)
    3. Resize the logical volume:

      lvresize -l 100%VG /dev/someDevice/someVolume
    4. Check that the logical volume was resized

      lvdisplay
    5. Check the filesystem for any errors (before resizing):

      e2fsck -f /dev/someDevice/someVolume

      Make sure the drive is unmounted before doing this.
    6. Resize ext3 filesystem:

      resize2fs /dev/someDevice/someVolume
    Quote
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