New Tech Tip: Expanding RAID1 arrays on Dell PERC 6/i Integrated RAID controllers

A customer with several modern Dell servers wanted to expand the RAID 1 arrays on each, and I was able to do this without backup-and-restore to external media: this saved a ton of time (though I did do a backup up front just-in-case).

This was useful enough that I wrote it up in a Tech Tip, in the hopes it may be helpful to others:

Extending a Dell PERC6/i RAID1 Array in place

But two important notes:

• RAID1 only — will not work with any other level
• PERC6/i only — has not been tested (or even looked at) on any other controller

Good luck!

Comments

[Christian Thomasberg]

hey, Nice guide!
I was just in the same situation, but found a safer way:
You can expand the volume in the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator. Its a bit more safe than to recreate the virtual disk :)
1. Select the PERC controller in the OMSA
2. Select Virtual disks
3. Select Reconfigure next to the volume and click execute.
4. This will expand the virtual disk nice and safely.
4. Afterwards expand the partition with diskpart as you say in your guide

/Christian

[Ian Pittam]

Great article!

Just to let you know that I successfully carried out the same
exercise on a Dell PERC 5/i RAID Controller with no data loss.
I replaced 2x 2.5" 73GB SAS Drives for 2x 2.5" 146GB SAS Drives in a PowerEdge 1950.

Ian

[Matt]

Thanks for a great article and for giving me hope!. I can confirm that this procedure does *NOT* work on a Dell SAS 6/i controller as much as I wished it would have.

Neither the RAID BIOS method or the Open Manage Server Admin tool suggested by Christian worked (config item did not appear).

We ended up "ghost" imaging the drive and deleting and recreating the raid. and ghosting back.

Fair warning ... the image took 30 mins to create and took 2.5 hours to put back.

-Matt

[Bob Wall]

One note on ths that might seem obvious to some but it wasn't to me until I spent a weekend doing this in vain: the Perc 6/i does NOT support drives larger than 2TB. And probably never will, as Dell doesn't seem to be updating it's firmware. I went through this whole procedure moving 2TB to 4TB and ended up with...2TB. Backed out and went back to the original setup. Incidentally, the basic procedure went a bit differently for me - had to restart then import the foreign config before it would start rebuilding the array, and then had to assign the 2nd drive as a hot spare before it would accept it into the array.

[Stefan]

Thanks, Steve, for this detailed instruction.

Just let you know, that it works with RAID10 as well.

Stefan