In Part #11 of this blog series we chatted about expanding an existing Virtual Disk and respective Volume.

Now what about expanding the Storage Pool itself. Let’s say for argument sake that you have run yourself out of space in your Storage Pool.

Luckily you still had some room left in your Storage Enclosure so you have decided to add some additional disks.

This blog post will show you how to add additional storage to your Storage Pool by simply adding additional disks.

 

Expand the Pool by adding more disks

So now the time has come to expand our S2D Pool. We can simply do this by adding more disks into our capacity tier.

We have acquired 2 additional 1 TB HDD Drives and now would like to get them added into the pool.

We have been told how easy this is so let’s see it in action.

We now have the disks inserted and want to view their status by running the following PowerShell command.

get-physicaldisk

 

The output isn’t surprising as these have been reused disks from another farm and were likely not cleaned.

We can see that they have a health status of Unknown and an Operational Status of Starting as seen in the screen shot below.

 

Get-PhysicalDisk Output

This can be easily fixed by simply running the Reset-PhysicalDisk PowerShell command.

Now in order to do this I have filtered the code below to look for a HealthStatus of unknown and reset all of the applicable disks.

$phydisk = (Get-Physicaldisk | Where-Object –FilterScript {$_.HealthStatus -Eq "Unknown"})

Reset-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName $phydisk.FriendlyName 

Get-physicaldisk

 

 

Get-PhysicalDisk showing the new disks

After waiting only a few minutes we can see that the disk with a serial number of W380188M has already been added to the pool and S2D is automatically rebalancing across the new drives.

Get-PhysicalDisk Showing that the drives have automatically been added to the S2D Pool

 

We are able to check the progress of adding the new disks by running the following PowerShell command.

Get-StorageHealthAction

 

Get-StorageHealthAction Output

 

 

As you can see, it has already added the physical drive to the storage pool. During the writing of this blog post we were able to capture a screen shot of the rebalancing mid-flight from Failover Cluster Manager.

PhysicalDisk5007 is the newly added disk and we can see the it has a used capacity of 65.3GB. This was actually taking space from Physical Disk5003 as it was decreasing from 400GB used.

 

Failover Cluster Manager showing the newly added disks

We can verify the percentage complete for the rebalancing by running the following PowerShell Command.

Get-StorageHealthAction

 

Get-StorageHealthAction Output showing the new jobs adding the disks

 

Once this rebalancing process completes, the 2nd physical disk that we added will also be added to the Pool.

 

Well there you have it we have successfully expanding our Storage Pool by simply adding a physical disk.

The rest of the work was done automagically for us by Storage Spaces Direct.

Happy learning….

 

Thanks,

 

Cristal

 

Cristal Kawula

Cristal Kawula is the co-founder of MVPDays Community Roadshow and #MVPHour live Twitter Chat. She was also a member of the Gridstore Technical Advisory board and is the President of TriCon Elite Consulting. Cristal is also only the 2nd woman in the world to receive the prestigious Veeam Vanguard award.

 

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Twitter: @supercristal1 / @mvpdays / #mvphour

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