HP MSA 1040 SMU Reference Guide (762784-001, March 2014)

Expanding a vdisk 87
Expanding a vdisk
You can expand the capacity of a vdisk by adding disks to it, up to the maximum number of disks that the storage
system supports. Host I/O to the vdisk can continue while the expansion proceeds. You can then create or expand a
volume to use the new free space, which becomes available when the expansion is complete. You can expand only
one vdisk at a time. As described in "About RAID levels" (page 26), the RAID level determines whether the vdisk can
be expanded and the maximum number of disks the vdisk can have. This task cannot be performed on an NRAID or
RAID-1 vdisk.
Adding single-ported disks to a vdisk that contains dual-ported disks is supported; however, because single-ported
disks are not fault-tolerant, a confirmation prompt will appear.
IMPORTANT: Expansion can take hours or days to complete, depending on the vdisk’s RAID level and size, disk
speed, utility priority, and other processes running on the storage system. You can stop expansion only by deleting
the vdisk. Before starting a vdisk expansion, see the HP website
http://www.hp.com/support/msa1040/BestPractices
.
Before expanding a vdisk
Back up the vdisk’s data so that if you need to stop expansion and delete the vdisk, you can move the data into a
new, larger vdisk.
To expand a vdisk
1. In the Configuration View panel, right-click a vdisk and select Tools > Expand Vdisk. Information appears about
the selected vdisk and all disks in the system.
• In the Disk Selection Sets table, the number of white slots in the vdisk’s Disks field shows how many disks you
can add to the vdisk.
• In the enclosure view or list, only suitable available disks are selectable.
2. Select disks to add.
3. Click Expand Vdisk. A confirmation dialog appears.
4. Click Yes to continue; otherwise, click No. If you clicked Yes, a processing dialog appears.
5. Click OK. The expansion’s progress is shown in the View > Overview panel.
Verifying a vdisk
If you suspect that a fault-tolerant (mirror or parity) vdisk has a problem, run the Verify utility to check the vdisk’s
integrity. For example, if the storage system was operating outside the normal temperature range, verify its vdisks.
The Verify utility analyzes the selected vdisk to find and fix inconsistencies between its redundancy data and its user
data. This utility fixes parity mismatches for RAID 3, 5, 6, and 50, and mirror mismatches for RAID 1 and 10. This
task can be performed only on a vdisk whose status is FTOL (fault tolerant and online); it cannot be performed for
NRAID or RAID 0.
TIP: Media Scrub Vdisk (page 88) operates similarly to Verify Vdisk but can find and fix media errors for any RAID
level, including NRAID and RAID 0.
Verification can last over an hour, depending on the size of the vdisk, the utility priority, and the amount of I/O
activity. You can use a vdisk while it is being verified. When verification is complete, event 21 is logged and specifies
the number of inconsistencies found. Such inconsistencies can indicate that a disk in the vdisk is going bad. For
information about identifying a failing disk, use the SMART option (see "Configuring SMART" (page 49)).
If too many utilities are running for verification to start, either wait until those utilities have completed and try again,
or abort a utility to free system resources. If you abort verification, you cannot resume it; you must start it over.
To verify a vdisk
1. In the Configuration View panel, right-click a fault-tolerant vdisk and select Tools > Verify Vdisk.
2. Click Start Verify Utility. A message confirms that verification has started.