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Extending VMware volumes
54 Dell EMC SC Series: Best Practices with VMware vSphere | 2060-M-BP-V
13 Extending VMware volumes
Within an ESXi host, there are three ways to extend or grow storage. This section provides the general steps
required. Additional information can be found in the vSphere Storage Guide, section “Increasing VMFS
Datastore Capacity", and in the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide, section “Virtual Disk
Configuration” located within the VMware vSphere documentation.
13.1 Increasing the size of VMFS datastores
Two methods can be used to increase the size of VMFS datastores: Expanding an existing extent
(recommended) or adding a new extent (not recommended).
13.1.1 Expanding an extent in an existing VMFS datastore
This functionality is used to grow an existing extent in a VMFS datastore, but it can be done only if there is
adjacent free capacity.
Growing Datastore3 using the adjacent 100 GB (in blue)
In Figure 31, extending the space at the end of an SC Series volume can be done using Dell Storage
Manager or the vSphere client plug-ins. After the volume has been extended and HBA rescanned, click
Increase… to edit the properties of the datastore to grow and follow the Increase Datastore Capacity wizard
instructions.
Be sure to select the Expandable volume, otherwise a VMFS extent will be added to the datastore (see
section 13.1.2 on VMFS extents).
Extending a 2 TB datastore by 1 TB
Note: As an alternative to extending a datastore volume when a virtual machine needs additional disk space,
create a datastore volume and migrate that virtual machine. This technique helps to keep volume sizes
manageable and helps to keep any single datastore from being overloaded due to I/O contention.
Note: All prior tasks in this section can be automated by using the Dell SC Series vSphere Client Plug-in.
More information about how to obtain the plug-in is in appendix B.