HP LH4r Integrated HP NetRaid Controller Configuration Guide - Page 72
Online Capacity Expansion Under Novell NetWare
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Chapter 7 Preparing for Online Capacity Expansion This chapter is divided into two sections: • See "Capacity Expansion Under Novell NetWare" if you are using Novell NetWare. • See "Capacity Expansion Under Windows NT" if you are using Microsoft Windows NT. Online Capacity Expansion Under Novell NetWare Theory of Operation Normally, to add capacity you must shut down the server to reconfigure and then restore data, or you must add the new storage space as a new volume. The Online Capacity Expansion feature allows you to expand an existing logical drive without shutting down the server. Capacity expansion is enabled separately on each logical drive. When enabled, the controller presents to the operating system a logical drive of 144 GB. However, only a part of the 144-gigabyte logical drive exists as actual physical storage. You configure volumes to use only the actual physical space while the virtual space allows room for online expansion. For example, assume you have one RAID-5 logical drive built from four physical hard disk drives of 9 GB each. The result is 27 GB of actual storage space. If you enable Virtual Sizing for this logical drive, then the operating system will see a logical drive of 144 GB. Only the first 27 GB are real, 9 GB are used for parity, and the last 108 GB are virtual. Under NetWare, you create an 144-GB partition, but within that partition you only create a logical drive totaling 27 GB or less. Since there is unused partition space, the physical storage of 27 GB can be expanded online by adding another hard disk drive, but the partition remains at 144 GB. Precautions When using the Online Capacity Expansion feature, it is very important that you do not create volumes that exceed the actual physical capacity. You must add up the capacities of all volumes that may be using the physical storage space, such as a DOS volume, SYS volume, Hot Fix Area, and any user volumes. This is most important if NetWare will be installed on the disk array (rather than a SCSI disk outside of the HP NetRAID system). During installation, if the total physical capacity is exceeded during volume creation, a NetWare abend and loss of the 66