FibreCat SX80 disk expand

[psaario]

Hello everyone !!

We had FibreCat SX80 with seven disk. Now we expand it with six disk. OK, we found out controller software sayed "You can expand only four (4) disk at time", so we desided add only four disk to raid-group, left one disk to hot-spare and add last disk later.

When we start this raid-group expanding, controller sotware sayed:"This prosess takes couple of minits". And now, after one week later, in screen we have 33% ready of raid-group expand.

So, my question is, does anyone know how long does it take to finish this kind of disk expand? Is there a mathematical formula to calculate how long it should take?

Lights are blinking and no one has told "its slow", so I assume everything is in order. But this slowness worrys me.

Thanks for answers.

[psaario]

Now, after couple of days we have 69% ready. So, calculating from that result I got 5.75%/day.

It take some time. But it will make it. So, next I´m going to wait how long it take to expand LUN.

Has anyone experience of that?

[psaario]

Hello Again !!

Now FibreCat disk expansion and volume extension has done. But there was couple surprises, and funny faces.

First, when we add new disks to disk-pool and expand raid-group with those new disks, we got message "This can take few minits". But instead of adding more blocks to disk table, that process expand whole data to new disks as well. So, after adding more block, we got power of new disks too. OK, unnormal behavior, but when it has made it over two weeks, it finally end. I think it was 17 days to add five more disk.

So, after expanding raid group, we extend LUN. Or we thought. It seems we got only 180GB more to our LUN1. But taking second look, we found out there is 2.1TB limit on LUN´s. So we made another LUN and add rest of free space to there.

And the to server side... Instead of extending LUN1, we saw one LUN more just behind our first LUN. So, we had to add this new space instead just checked new space. Lucky us, that disk was not Basic disk and we can add more free space. Then, creating new LUN, mark it, change disk mode and add it to old LUN+LUN1. And got information "server must reboot because of changes".

We reboot server and... lost all our ACL´s. All rights was gone. No one has access to nowhere. Great!! That what we need... So, another reboot and server start to run checkdisk. After couple of hours, checkdisk was ready. We had 180GB .chk files on root, and information "disk full" when we try to restore data with permissions from tape. Another magic moment!! We could see there was 30-40GB free space, but still Netbackup sayed "Disk full". Some hours later, we discover there was Quota software, Symantec "Storage Manager", and when we reboot server first time, it can´t understand new disk space and it corrupt user rights. Or at least that´s what we think. And then, after checkdisk, it linked those .chk files to sub directories, and even there was some space, Quota software says "Disk full", because there was personal Quota overflow.

This Quota software was surprise to all of us. No one knew there was running software like that. So, in the end, over three weeks, we got five more disk on raid-group, and more volume on Windows server.

...and we have to more disks to add...