Hello all,

I have a question regard an ISCSI setup we have in our environment.
We just deployed a server DL380 G3 with ISCSI to a Netapp filer.

The network guys set it up using a hardware based initiator and I have no knowledge of how it was setup (some faint clues were it uses a qlogic card).

All I know is when I do an fdisk -l I see a new volume just as if it were a local drive. The question I have is how do I get Red Hat to know let say if the iscsi volume is extended?

Should I install the iscsi-initiator tools in Red Hat so it will detect these changes? Or is it pointless since its a hardware based initiator.

I formatted the volume as linux using fdisk and put a ext3 file system on it. I then had the network guys extend the ISCSI volume by 10GB to see if the additional disk space would show up but did not. The only way to get the additional space was to backup then re-format the volume again.

I then thought to use LVM to see if we could detect changes in the physical volume that way. I did a pvlist but still shows the same size.

Can any one provide recommendations on how extensions to the ISCSI volume from Netapp can be picked up by Linux without going into fdisk and manually extending the volume? I was recommended to use snap drive from Netapp but we don't have licenses to it and I am thinking we can use LVM to extend the physical volume?

Any help would be great.

Thanks

You can delete the partition and create a new one, as long as the partition id is the same, and it starts on the same sector as the original it should be fine. Then use resize2fs or pvresize depending on what you're using.

And, as always make sure you have backups!

iscsi-initiator-utils implements the initiator in software. You either use that or the hardware one, but not both together

If you don't want to mess about manually with fdisk, then instead of extending existing LUNs, create new ones, format them as PVs and add them to your VG. Then grow or add to your LVs as you wish.

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phil.d.g, thank you for your quick response and excellent suggestions. I will go with your second suggestion and just tell them to create a new lun and add it as a physical volume.