Increasing Logical Disk Capacity on a drive stored on SAN Storage IBM DS3300

Most of us will be presented with the need of increasing logical disk capacity on drives that are stored in SAN. It may happen that these drives were already presented to the respective Operating Systems and in time, the need to increase the storage space on the server may arise.

I would like to share an experience of performing such an activity. First of all we need to note if your SAN Storage supports the capability of adding space to the hardware RAID container before we can perform this. On the IBM DS range of storage systems, this is supported by either doing the ADD FREE CAPACITY task on the GUI or Storage Manager or via CLI using the script editor.

After you have expanded the array, you can expand the logical drive with the additional free space from the array. On the DS 3300 series, with the Storage Manager 2 client, this can only be done using the script editor.

With which you can use the command below to perform the operation.

set logicalDrive ["DriveNameonSAN"] addCapacity=20 GB;

Now that you have added capacity on the SAN drive, this will be visible on the Operating System and you can use your OS tools to extend the volume. Note that there are conditions that need to be met before you extend the drive and is documented here

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325590

Fortunately Windows Server 2008 has the extend feature on Disk Management so you can perform the steps on the GUI similar to the screen below.

Note that before you perform this procedure make sure you know the impact to your applications hosted on the drive to be extended. It does not hurt to do a backup as well but you already know that ;)