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Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller 9 User’s Guide H330, H730, and H830

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Reconfigure virtual disks

An online virtual disk can be reconfigured in ways that expands its capacity and changes its RAID level.
NOTE:Spanned virtual disks such as RAID 50 and 60 cannot be reconfigured.
NOTE:Reconfiguring virtual disks typically impacts disk performance until the reconfiguration operation is complete.

Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) can be done in following ways:

  1. If there is a single virtual disk in a disk group and free space is available, the capacity of a virtual disk can be expanded within that free space. If multiple virtual disks exist within a common disk group, the capacities of those virtual disks cannot be expanded.
    NOTE:Online capacity expansion is allowed on a disk group with a single virtual disk that begins at the start of the physical disk. It is not allowed when there is a free space at the beginning of a disk.
  2. Add additional physical disks to a virtual disk to increase its capacity.
  3. After replacing all array members with larger drives than the original members, use the PERC CLI utility to expand the existing virtual disk to a larger size using the expandarray parameter. For more information, see Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller Command Line Interface Reference Guide.

RAID level migration (RLM) refers to changing a virtual disk’s RAID level. Both RLM and OCE can be done simultaneously so that a virtual disk can simultaneously have its RAID level that is changed and its capacity increased. When an RLM or an OCE operation is complete, a reboot is not required.

CAUTION:Do not attempt disk migration during RLM or OCE operations. This causes loss of the virtual disk.
NOTE:If an RLM or an OCE operation is in progress, then an automatic drive rebuild or copyback operation will not start until the operation is complete.
NOTE: If the controller already contains the maximum number of virtual disks, you cannot perform a RAID level migration or capacity expansion on any virtual disk.
NOTE:The controller changes the write cache policy of all virtual disks to write-through until the RLM or OCE operation is complete.
NOTE:You cannot initiate an OCE or an RLM on any virtual disk on the controller where a virtual disk with an ID of 239 exists.
NOTE:RLM is supported only on the H730 and H830 controller, and is not supported on the H330 controller.

See the following table for a list of RLM or OCE options: The source RAID level column indicates the virtual disk RAID level before the RLM or OCE operation and the target RAID level column indicates the RAID level after the RLM or OCE operation.

Table 1. RAID level migrationRAID level migration
Source RAID Level Target RAID Level Number of Physical Disks (Beginning) Number of Physical Disks (End) Capacity Expansion Possible Description
RAID 0 RAID 0 1 or more 2 or more Yes Increases capacity by adding disks.
RAID 0 RAID 1 1 2 Yes Converts a non-redundant virtual disk into a mirrored virtual disk by adding one disk.
RAID 0 RAID 5 1 or more 3 or more Yes Adds distributed parity redundancy; at least one disk must be added.
RAID 0 RAID 6 1 or more 4 or more Yes Adds dual distributed parity redundancy; at least two disks must be added.
RAID 1 RAID 0 2 2 or more Yes Removes redundancy while increasing capacity.
RAID 1 RAID 5 2 3 or more Yes Maintains redundancy while adding capacity.
RAID 1 RAID 6 2 4 or more Yes Adds dual distributed parity redundancy and adds capacity.
RAID 5 RAID 0 3 or more 2 or more Yes Converts to a non-redundant virtual disk and reclaims disk space that is used for distributed parity data; one disk can be removed.
RAID 5 RAID 5 3 or more 4 or more Yes Increases capacity by adding disks.
RAID 5 RAID 6 3 or more 4 or more Yes Adds dual distributed parity redundancy; at least one disk needs to be added.
RAID 6 RAID 0 4 or more 2 or more Yes Converts to a non-redundant virtual disk and reclaims disk space that is used for distributed parity data; two disks can be removed.
RAID 6 RAID 5 4 or more 3 or more Yes Removes one set of parity data and reclaims disk space used for it; one disk can be removed.
RAID 6 RAID 6 4 or more 5 or more Yes Increases capacity by adding disks.
RAID 10 RAID 10 4 or more 6 or more Yes Increases capacity by adding disks; an even number of disks must be added.
NOTE:You cannot perform a RAID level migration and expansion on RAID levels 50 and 60.

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