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I have a PowerVault MD3000i connected to a PowerEdge 1950 via iSCSI. The MD3000i has ~7TB of space. We want to use pretty much all of this space as one large file server configured with RAID 5. We have one disk group set to RAID 5, and in it, one virtual disk. This virtual disk is the LUN connected to the PowerEdge 1950 via iSCSI.

I've added the free capacity to the disk group, giving the disk group a total of ~4TB. I then used the SMcli.exe command smcli.exe <IP_ADDRESS> -p <PASSWORD> -c set virtualDisk [<VIRTUAL_DISK_NAME>] addCapacity=2300000000000 to add the remaining 2.3TB in the disk group's free capacity to the disk group's virtual disk.

It has now been over a day since this operation completed, yet I still don't see the unallocated space in Disk Management on the server connecting to the PowerVault. I did this once before with a smaller amount of space (~450GB), but I don't remember if there is another step I'm missing after adding the space to the virtual disk to get it to show up on the server.

Alternatively, I've read there could be size limitations for virtual disks based on your OS/partition table format/etc, could this be the issue? The 1950 is running 2008 R2 SP1, and the iSCSI disk attached to it is NTFS.

All help is appreciated! Thanks!

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  • Have you done a refresh or rescan from within the disk management snap-in (or rebooted the server)?
    – techieb0y
    Aug 15, 2015 at 3:11
  • Ah perfect, this is what I needed to do. Thanks for the help!
    – Michael H
    Aug 19, 2015 at 18:21

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there could be size limitations for virtual disks based on your OS/partition table format

This is correct. MBR partition tables have a maximum partition size of 2TB, so if you're using MBR (the windows default during partitioning from the GUI) then you'll need to use the "Convert to GPT Disk" option in disk management.

@techieb0y's comment also touches on an important point - changes to the reported available disk size aren't automatically refreshed for an iSCSI disk like this, and you'll need to perform a "rescan" from the disk management "Action" menu to detect the change you made on the back-end storage.

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  • After I did a rescan like techieb0y suggested, I was able to see the additional unallocated space. It also appears this disk was already GPT, so I got lucky there. Thanks for all your help!
    – Michael H
    Aug 19, 2015 at 18:23

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