Expand RAID disk config, best practice

[paul@servercare.nl]

Hi gents,

We're running a HA StarWind 5.7 cluster, with about 20Tb on each node in RAID50. Our nodes are filling up quicker than expected and we'd like to expand the raid configuration of each node in the storage cluster. Besides using the SAN for data we also run a Hyper-V cluster from it.

What is the best approach? This is our line of thinking: (the servers/starwind clusternodes are called store1 and store2)

1. simply shutdown store2; HA should pick up & everything should be OK.
2. Add disks to the store2 server and rebuild the RAID50 array (the OS is on a seperate raid1 array)
3. Bring store 2 back up & reconfigure Starwind (?)
4. re-sync the HA disks from Store1
5. Shutdown store1
6. Add disks to Store1 and rebuild RAID array
7. re-sync starwind

Is there a more elegant/beter way to do this? Any steps missing? Is there some way to do a 'gracefull shutdown' starwind to make sure it doesn't throw a fit when we just down the server? Anything we can do in preperation to make this go more smoothly?

thanks

Paul

[Anatoly (staff)]

Hello Paul,

Before saying "Your plan sounds good" I`d like to ask you to clarify one thing:)
What do you mean by saying

reconfigure StarWind

?

Thanks

[paul@servercare.nl]

Sorry for my late reply Anatoly, been on vacation.

Good question; I was assuming I would need to reconfigure some things after having completely removed the storage of one of the servers. Can I conclude from your response that I can simply delete and recreate the RAID config & drive and then Starwind will be fine resyncing (and thus recreating) the storage?

[Anatoly (staff)]

Well, actually I have news for you:
We have released new version (5.8, you can download it here), and there is availability to increase HA device size on-fly.
The only thing is that you will need the downtime for update (update procedure is described in Release Notes, you can see them in installation wizard).