UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Good Morning everyone,

I want to know how to allocate unallocated drive space from a SAN to a file system that desperately needs the drive space. Does anyone have any documentation or tips on how to accomplish this? I am running on AIX version 6.1.

There is no such procedure because it depends heavily on what your SAN is, how it is connected to your system, which infrastructure (switches, fabrics, ....) there are in between, which tool you use for zoning, which drivers (SDD, Multipath, EMC powermt, ....) you use and probably some other things that didn't come to my mind off the top of my head.

Basically - but this will help you nothing in practice, just makes you understanding the process better - you create a virtual disk (aka LUN) on the SAN, present that to the system, run cfgmgr to make the disk known to the system, add the disk to a VG (or create a new one) and add the additional space to some FS (or create a new one and mount it).

You alternatively increase the size of an existing LUN, run cfgmgr and then run chvg -g, but if this is possible or even advisable is a matter of the imponderables named above. So tell us about your environment and we might be able to help you.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Often times you expose a new LUN which serves as the device for the filesystem. Then the OS just needs to scan and find the new LUN. IBM does make devices that portray more physical defined objects (looking like DASD) though. Hard to give specifics without knowing more about your SAN env (especially the storage unit).