Extend/shrink deduplicated disk

[andyman80]

Is there any way to extend (increase the reported to OS disk size) or shrink (decrease the size of the underlying .spdata files) of the deduplicated thin-provisioned disk in SW 5.7.1733?

[anton (staff)]

You cannot do it right now. You would be able to expand the disk adding new LUN to it (pretty much like hardware RAID controllers do) but we're not going to provide any functionality for decreasing virtual disk size (leaves too many questions for underlying file system layout).

Is there any way to extend (increase the reported to OS disk size) or shrink (decrease the size of the underlying .spdata files) of the deduplicated thin-provisioned disk in SW 5.7.1733?

[andyman80]

Do you have plans to implement disk extend functionality in future versions?
As for shrink, I guess It could be done by creating a brand new thin-provisioned disk followed by copying the contents of the old disk to the new one. Anyway it will require some extra disk space for that.

[anton (staff)]

Yes of course. Already mentioned multi-LUN extending feature should be released as part of V5.8 de-duplication engine.

Sure you can proceed this way. Extra copy of data but you can call it "backup" in any case

Do you have plans to implement disk extend functionality in future versions?
As for shrink, I guess It could be done by creating a brand new thin-provisioned disk followed by copying the contents of the old disk to the new one. Anyway it will require some extra disk space for that.

[andyman80]

Well, I mean the old disk should be deleted afterwards. Thanks for you help.

[anton (staff)]

Yes, that's a plan: copy content to brand new disk, check it (new disk) for integrity and delete old disk afterwards. To do the same automatically we need to parse file system content and there are too many file systems could be layered on top of iSCSI block device.