We have a MSA2000. We had 7 146gb disks in them Raid 5. Created 1 virtual disk and I had 5 volumes. All 5 volumes added up to be around 817gb or so. Our "Data" folder was 805GB.
Recently we purchased qty 5 300gb disks to fill up the enclosure. My thought was we were going to just add the additional space to the existing virtual disk and volume and increase our storage by 1.2tb. So I did a virtual disk expansion and then did a volume expansion. Both took quite some time to process.
So, I go and look back now, and I first dorked up and added the additional space to the wrong volume, the volume I used for the quorum. Oops. Then realized, why when viewing the volume on the MSA it is only 735GB instead of 1.2tb? All the calculators out there say qty 5 disks at 500gb each at raid 5 will give me 1.2tb usable space.
So I was thinking first, how to I reverse these changes and just start over, and create a new virtual disk and a new volume. Couldn't figure out how. HP says I can't reverse the changes.
So my question is. WHAT are my options here? Also, any explanation on why it is only 735gb?
Oh one more thing, when I go onto one of my failover cluster management servers, and go into disk management, I cannot assign the disk space or work with it?
Basically I am having a hard time accepting loosing 465gb worth of storage…
Any advice would be great. Thanks all..
Best Answer
If you expanded the existing array, it would only use 146GB of each disk. The rest of the 300 would be wasted.
There's no reversing it. As you said HP will confirm there's no undo operations. You should be incredibly careful when making changes to make to a SAN; and plan those changes extensively. At this point you can only backup the data, delete the array, and start from scratch.
You're best option is to have two RIAD5 arrays (assuming you want to stick with RAID5). One of the smaller disks, one of the larger. Then divide your data across them appropriately.