Adding Extra Diskspace to a XenServer v5.5 v5.6 Installation
If like me, you installed XenServer onto your physical hardware, mine was a Dell 2950 III, and forgot to create extra arrays, for the remaining disks, you’ll need to add them to XenServer afterwards.
Slightly Newer instructions posted underneath
These are the steps I followed to get the storage added.
- Create your new arrays, within the RAID controller
- Fire up Citrix XenServer
- Connect to the console of the XenServer. It may show you a GUI or the command shell.
- Choose the 2nd to last option – Command Shell, if the GUI is displayed
- Type fdisk -l – This will show you all of the volumes and hard drives
- Type pvcreate /dev/sdb – sdb will be your new volume
- You’ll need to find out the name assigned to your new hard disk
- Type cd /dev/disk/by-id and press enter.
- Type ls to list the entries in this folder
- Now here’s the tricky bit – try to identify which disk is the new one. I went for the last scsi one in the list and got it right. make a note of the name
- Type : xe sr-create type=lvm content-type=user device-config:device=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST3320620ASad15geb name-label=â€ÂNew Dataâ€Â
This should add the data into XenServer with the name “New Data” as the storage name.
I think from memory I restarted at this point.
And that should be it.
The main difference between doing it retrospectively and during the install, is that if you add the disks afterwards, it appears as a second data store. If you do it during the install, it adds all the data together and clumps it all together in a single data store.
Personally I think it’s safer to have them separate.
Hope this helps
JK
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have just revisited this issue, on another XenServer and the instructions have changed a little. Here goes
In section 6, where you run PVCREATE, which creates a new logical volume, before I was running
Code:
pvcreate /dev/sdb
to create a new sdb volume.
In the new HP DL180 G6 server, the disks are being presented / controlled, by a HP Smart Arrary P710 controller, which serves up the disks to Xen slightly differently
the smart array disks are present as /dev/cciss/arrays
therefore in this instance I had to issue the following command
Code:
pvcreate /dev/cciss/c0d1
– as this was the iD for the 2nd array
The second bit, where we create the storage repository using sr-create, changed also – section 11
The id’s listed when doing a
Code:
ls /dev/disk/by-id -l
where cciss related and not SCSI related, like in the original topic. So the new syntax on this HP server was
Code:
xe sr-create type=lvm content-type=user device-config:device=/dev/disk/by-id/cciss-859485048afecc6ee08cccffg88 name-label=â€ÂData1â€Â
where the id was the last disk in my /dev/disk/by-id ls listing.
I then added other arrays to the system using the RAID controller utility and as the new ID’s appeared in the ls listing of /dev/disk/by-id I added them in much the same way.
Hope this helps
Jonathan