Test Lab – Day 5 Expanding the IOMega ix12-300r
Recently I installed an IOMega ix12-300r for our ESX test lab and it’s doing quite will
However I wanted to push our Iomega to about 1Gbs of sustained NFS traffic of the available 2Gbs.
To do this I needed to expand our 2 drive storage pool to 4 drives.
From a previous post we created 3 storage pools as seen below.
Storage Pool 0 (SP0) 4 Drives for basic file shares (CIFS)
Storage Pool 1 (SP1_NFS) 2 drives for ESX NFS Shares only
Storage Pool 2 (SP2_iSCSI) 2 drives dedicated for ESX iSCSI only
In this post I’m going to delete the unused SP2_iSCSI and add those drives to SP1_NFS
Note: This procedure is simply the pattern I used in my environment. I’m not stating this is the right way but simply the way it was done. I don’t recommend you use this pattern or use it for any type of validation. These are simply my notes, for my personal records, and nothing more.
Under settings select storage pools
Select the Trash Can to delete the storage pools..
It prompted me to confirm and it deleted the storage pool.
Next I choose the Edit icon on SP2_NFS, selected the drives I wanted, choose RAID 5, and pressed apply.
From there it started to expand the 2 disk RAID1 to a 4 disk RAID5 storage pool..
Screenshot from the IOMega ix12 while it is being expanded…
I then went to the Dashboard and under status I can view its progress…
ALL this with NO Down time to ESX, in fact I’m writing this post from a VM at the expansion is happening.
It took about 11 Hours to rebuild the RAID set.
Tip: Use the event log under settings to determine how long the rebuild took.
The next day I checked in on ESX and it was reporting the updated store size.
Summary…
To be able to expand your storage pool that houses your ESXi test environment with no down time is extremely beneficial and a very cool feature.
Once again IOMega is living up to its tag line – IOmega Kicks NAS!
Tomorrow we’ll see how it performs when we push a higher load to it.
vmexplorer 
May 27, 2011 at 4:50 pm
How’s the performance of your Iomega ix12-300r? I’m looking to do something similar as you for test lab storage and I’m considering the Iomega or the QNAP TS-859U-RP+. The 5900 rpm drives in the Iomega make me a bit leary of its performance.
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