Unable to extend a VMFS volume

[MarcelBouman]

I have a VMWare 5 Essentials installation that i upgraded from version 4.

I initially had 4 300 GB disks in a hardware raid. After the upgrade to version 5 i added 4 extra disks and used the HP software to extend the logical volume to 1.9 TB.

I am trying to add this new space to my VMFS datastore but am unable to.

When i select my Host in VCenter and go to Storage in the Configuration tab and then go to Devices then i can see the capacity of my disk is recognized as 1.91 TB.

It also shows the current Primary and Logical partitions:

Primary:

1. DOS 16-Bit <32M       4,00 MB

2. DOS 16-Bit >=32M     4,00 GB

3. VMFS                        833,22 GB

4. Extended                   896,00 MB

Logical:

1. DOS 16 Bit >=32M     250,00 MB

When i go into the Datastore Properties dialog box and click the Increase button then i should see a list of the available free space.

This list remains empty and so i can't extend the volume.

The file system is VMFS 5,54 with a 1 MB Block size.

Any help would be very much appriciated!

With kind regard,

Marcel Bouman

[Virtualinfra]

Welcome to the community.

Did you try to rescan , If not please do a rescan by clicking the rescan all option under configuration and storage in the right side near add storage.

Then try to increase the volume.It should work, as its already populated, you should be able to increase the size.

Award points for the helpful and correct answer by clicking the below tab :smileyhappy:

[MarcelBouman]

I did miltiple rescans but it didn't change anyting i'm afraid.

With kind regards,

Marcel Bouman

Op 24 jan. 2012 om 19:26 heeft "Dharshan" <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> het volgende geschreven:

VMware Communities<http://communities.vmware.com/index.jspa>

Unable to extend a VMFS volume

reply from Dharshan<http://communities.vmware.com/people/Virtualinfra> in VMware ESXi 5 - View the full discussion<http://communities.vmware.com/message/1899640#1899640

[a_p_]

The VMFS datatore on the installation disk cannot be increased in the GUI. You may be able to do this from the console. (see e.g. http://deinoscloud.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/how-to-increase-the-size-of-a-local-datastore-on-an-esxi4/) You may need to use partedUtil instead of fdisk to resize the partition. However, fdisk might still work for an upgraded ESXi 5.0 host. In any case I recommend you have an up to date backup of the VMs.

André

[dhabbetichandra]

All space allocated to logical drives. you dont have Free Space , thatswhy its is not showing in extended properties. you must delete logical drives 5,6,7,8. Dont forget taking backup if you have any data on those.

[a_p_]

All space allocated to logical drives. you dont have Free Space ,  thatswhy its is not showing in extended properties.

The screen shot shows a disk size of 1.91TB with only ~840GB used.

you must delete  logical drives 5,6,7,8.

Why do you think deleting/destroying the ESXi installation would help?

André

[Jvdp]

You cannot resize the 3rd primary partition (which is where the VMFS datastore resides) because the free space in the expanded array is not immediately after the VMFS datastore partition (i.e.: The existence of that extended partition is preventing you from doing so.)

Probably you have extended you existing volume. Instead, to see an extend, you should have created a new volume from the available space instead of extending the existing one. Then it would show up as a possible extend which will allow you to extend the datastore.

Best practice should be to run ESXi from a USB media key, so your VMFS datastore would be the only partition on your RAID volume. If you have not put this server into production, that might be a good suggestion.

[MarcelBouman]

Thank you for your help!

I have tried to use fdisk in the console to recreate the partition but fdisk doesn't seem to work the same on Version 5 anymore.

I now have tried deleting the datastore from the system and recreating it in the hope that it will utilize the whole 2 TB disk.

It doesn't. It can only recreate a maximum drive size of 256 GB. This is most likely due to the 1 MB block size of the partition in VMWare!

It is not possible to create more than one of these datastores on the disk which strikes me as odd. Also, why was it possible to have a partition size of 833 GB before? The block size was 1 MB then too!

So now i only have 256 GB left of my 2 TB disk! This is going in the wrong direction....

I'm considering reinstalling the ESXi. This may all be a complication of the 4.1 to 5.0 upgrade.

I included a screenshot of the new datastore properties.

[a_p_]

Sorry for the delay, I did a rebuild of my test system these days.

I reproduced what you have and was able to successfully increase the VMFS volume as documented in the link I provided (except VMFS was partition 3)

What I did was to install ESXi 4.1 U2 on a 900GB disk, then upgrade to ESXi 5.0 and increase the disk size to 1.9TB. Then I opened an SSH session, used fdisk to resize/grow the VMFS partition (which btw. is a primary partition with the additional new disk space adjacent to it) and expanded the grown partition using vmkfstools.

If you did not already rebuild the host, please post the output af fdisk -lu as well as ls /vmfs/devices/disks

André

[MarcelBouman]

Hi André,

Thank you for that exhaustive test of my situation!

I think one difference between your situation and mine might be that the free space on my disk was not adjacent to the VMFS partition.

The biggest difference is actually, as Mark Minasi once put it, not silicon but carbon based! I don't have the experience with VMWare to troubleshoot problems at this level yet. Even with help that is. So I did decide to rebuild the system from scratch circumventing the upgrade route and it worked without a hitch.

So thanks again all posters for your suggestions, it's much appreciated.

Marcel Bouman

[christianZ]

You should better  create a new logical volume (in your hp raid) and then expand the datastore over the new lun - that should work.

In the past it was possible to create a new partition on the empty space (fdisk), change its type to "fb" and then expand the datastore.

All these with commands.

Reg

Christian