LKBEN10697: Howto extend a volume on a windows cluster node with or without a SAN infrastructure

Symptom

You need to enlarge or extend a volume used on a file cluster system

Cause

You run out of diskspace

Solution

This might be different in your situation and depends on the hardware you have. Under normal circumstances, you can follow the following steps to increase the diskspace:

1. Make a backup before you start.
2. Extend the volume in your SAN (=storage area network)
2b. depending on your hardware you can do the following in an online state or have to take the cluster resource offline
3. Start a command line and type "diskpart"
4. Rescan the disks on your windows system by typing "rescan" on the interactive command of diskpart (you should see the unused space behind the extended disk in your disk management GUI)
5. select the volume you need to expand (to find out which one, you can use the "list volume" command)
6. type "extend"
7. you should get the information that the extend was succesfull
8. type exit
9. check if the cluster resource can come online and if the failover works

When you need to add an extra HD or you do not have a SAN the following might be more appropriate:

1. Back up the shared disks that that you want to extend. This is always good!
2. Power off all but one node in the cluster. So it can be configured before other nodes can see it.
3. Take the entire group that the physical disk resource is located in offline. Bring only the physical disk resource that is to be extended online. This process should close any open handles to the disk. If you have any disk or Host Bus Adapter (HBA) utilities that access the disk, you may need to quit them or stop the services so that they will release any handles to the disk.
4. Add the additional physical drives and extend the additional disk or disks as free space by using the instructions that are included with the hardware vendor documentation.
5. Click All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, click Computer Management, and then start the Disk Management console. Verify that the new free space is added to the end of the proper drive. Right-click the existing partition, and then click Properties. On the General tab, type a unique name for the partition. This name will be used to identify the partition you want to extend in Diskpart.exe. Quit Computer Management.
6. At a command prompt, type "DISKPART", and then press ENTER
7. Type "LIST VOLUME", to display the existing volumes on the computer.
8. Type "SELECT VOLUME volume-number", where volume number is the number of the volume that you want to extend. Note that the volume will have the unique name that you created in step 5, and will have been listed in the output of the command you ran in step 7.
9. Type "EXTEND", and then press ENTER to extend the partition into all of the available disk space to the end of the drive.
10. Type "EXIT", and then press ENTER.
11. Now that the volume has been extended, you can bring the entire group that contains the physical disk resource online, and then power up all of the other nodes in the cluster.
12. Verify that the group can come online and failover to all other nodes in the cluster.

Disclaimer:

About the Author

Author: Wim Peeters - Keskon GmbH & Co. KG

Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience, including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform.