How to expand an HP HW RAID LUN

[hennish]

Hi. I have an HP DL380 G5 with StarWind Enterprise, which is filled with disks od varying sizes. I'm thinking about changing one of our RAID 10 LUNs to a RAID 5 to gain some disk space. This can be done live in HP Array Configuration Utility, but I'm a little worried about the consequences:

What will happen to the existing LUN, which I have shared in StarWind as a "disk bridge" device? Will it just share a larger LUN to the iSCSI initiators (VMware ESX 3.5). If so, will I be able to create an extent in the new extra space?

Or, will HP ACU allow me to create a new LUN in the new space? In that case I can create a new disk bridge device in Starwind, and all would be fine.

Any ideas?

Thanks! /Anders

[Aitor_Ibarra]

Personally I wouldn't touch RAID5, even if it does get you more useable space than RAID1 or RAID10...

Even if the HP Raid card can do online RAID level conversion, I wouldn't risk your data with it! Conversion to RAID5 will take a long time if it's a big volume, during performance will be hit even if the card can keep the volume online during the conversion. I would schedule some downtime, back everything up, verify the backup, do the conversion but with your inititator systems offline, and if the conversion looks like taking longer than your downtime window, stop it, delete the RAID volume and create a fresh one, then restore from backup.

[hennish]

Thanks for the advice. I failed to mention that this actually is a lab/test/dev environment connected using iSCSI over cross-over cables, so performance and data security isn't super crucial.

[Robert (staff)]

It will just share the extended size via iSCSI.