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Windows Server Forum / Exchange Server / Design / June 2006excahnge best practice regarding SAN volume expansion
We are in the process of switching over to using SAN storage for exchange 2003. Our storage guys have said that if we have a LUN that is presented to exchange that is 100gb in size and in 6 months we need more space, they can thru the storage system expand the volume of the LUN and thus when that LUN is then presented to exchange it is now 200gb. Is this a recommended practice or should we be asking the strorage guys for the 200gb now and not try to expand the LUN? Thanks Mike Depends on the storage. Some vendors require you to run external utilities and/or take the LUN down during expansion. Depending on the virualization layer there may be a need for contiguous space at the end of the volume. In some cases there are performance considerations. I think it's something you need to talk with your SAN vendor about. > We are in the process of switching over to using SAN storage for exchange > 2003. Our storage guys have said that if we have a LUN that is presented [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > > Mike The vendor will certainly say that they can expand the LUN and then present it to exchange. This action is typical on file servers and I'm sure poses no issues, but we all know that exchange is a different beast when it comes to storage requirements. Just because the vendor says they can and have done it, doesn't mean that it is best practice to do that. Similar to running exchange with circular logging turned on. Yes you can run exchange with circular logging on, and under most circumstances, especially in small environments, will pose no issues, HOWEVER, it is not a recommended best practice. That is what I would like to know regarding SAN volume expansion. Is it best practice to do so? Thanks Mike > Depends on the storage. Some vendors require you to run external utilities > and/or take the LUN down during expansion. Depending on the virualization [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > > > > Mike It really boils down to two potential issues: downtime and performance. The impact vaies depending on the specific SAN architecture. On NetApp wich is probably a best case scenario, if you are not clustered, you can expand a LUN on the fly with no downtime. When you expand the LUN, there will likely be performance impact. In a cluster, the disk resource will briefly go offline during the expansion, so there is some downtime also. It's a nice feature, and it beats evacuating the LUN, destroying it, creating a new LUN and restoring the data, but as a best practice I would have to say start with the full size. > The vendor will certainly say that they can expand the LUN and then > present [quoted text clipped - 43 lines] >> > >> > Mike I agree with John that it should be best practice to start with the size you think you will need at the end. But I want to let you know that I haven't seen any issues expanding LUNs using HP EVA 5000 or 8000 when Exchange was running as well. Eric > It really boils down to two potential issues: downtime and performance. The > impact vaies depending on the specific SAN architecture. On NetApp wich is [quoted text clipped - 53 lines] > >> > > >> > Mike We've done expansion with HP EVA's and it work'd fine. But I'd recommend you get the space you'll eventually need now. > Depends on the storage. Some vendors require you to run external > utilities and/or take the LUN down during expansion. Depending on the [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] >> >> Mike As other said it's worth taling to the SAN vendor.Windows can do dynamic disk, this might be all that is needed. Clusters can only do dynamic disk with 3rd party utility such as Vertas's product. > We are in the process of switching over to using SAN storage for exchange > 2003. Our storage guys have said that if we have a LUN that is presented [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > > Mike |
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