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