Expanding volumes

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You can use the management GUI or the command-line interface (CLI) to expand the capacity of a volume.

The system supports expanding the size of a volume concurrent with I/O operations, when supported by the host operating system.

You can expand volumes for the following reasons:
  • To increase the available capacity on a particular volume that is already mapped to a host.
  • To increase the size of a volume so that it matches the size of another volume so that it can be used in a FlashCopy® mapping or remote-copy relationship.
  • For volumes in non-incremental FlashCopy mappings, you can increase the capacity regardless of whether the volume is the source or target volume. For volumes in incremental FlashCopy mappings, both the source and target volumes can be expanded, but the capacity of the target volume must be expanded first.
  • To expand the size of HyperSwap® volumes if the following conditions are true:
    • All copies of the volume are synchronized.
    • All copies of the volume are thin-provisioned or compressed.
    • No mirrored copies exist.
    • The volume is not in a consistency group. To work around this limitation, you can remove the HyperSwap relationship for the volume from the consistency group, and then expand the volume. After the volume is expanded, add the HyperSwap relationship for the volume back to the consistency group.

Using the management GUI

To expand a volume by using the management GUI, complete the following steps:
  1. Click Volumes > Volumes.
  2. On the Volumes page, right-click the volume and select Modify Volume Capacity.
  3. On the Modify Volume Capacity page, verify the volume that is being changed. The management GUI identifies volumes that are apart of a FlashCopy mapping. If you changing the capacity of one volume that is used in a FlashCopy mapping, the other volume in the mapping must also be changed so the capacity is the same on both volumes. If capacity does not match for volumes that are used in a FlashCopy mapping, the FlashCopy mapping cannot be started. The FlashCopy mapping displays with Capacity Mismatch value for Volume Capacity column on the FlashCopy mappings page. For more information, see Changing volume capacity for FlashCopy mappings.
  4. Select Expand to increase the capacity of the selected volume.
  5. Select the amount of capacity and the unit of capacity to increase the volume capacity by.
  6. Click Expand.

Using the command-line interface

To expand a volume, enter the following command:
expandvdisksize -size disk_size -unit data_unit -mdisk mdisk_id_or_name_list -fmtdisk vdisk_id_or_name
where disk_size specifies the capacity by which the volume is expanded. The mdisk_id_list | mdisk_name_list specifies the list of one or more MDisks to be used as the stripe set. The -fmtdisk command specifies that the volume be formatted before use