Among other hardware in our SAN, we have one of these nice and small, entry level SAN boxes from IBM. It’s called DS3400. It blends well into the rest of the SAN fabric, and seems to work quite well. So far, so good.
Today, I had to extend one of the volumes hosted on that box. So I started up the expected tool, the “IBM System Storage DS Storage Manager (Enterprise Management)” *pant*, found the box, the correct array, and volume (“Logical drive”), and expected to just right click and add capacity.
Not so.
Okay, so I looked at the “Modify” menu, which would let me “Add free capacity”, but in terms of disks to an array, not free space to a volume. After a bit of searching, I concluded that this fancy GUI does actually not let me grow a volume. How “Enterprise” is that?
After some extensive googling, I found that this was certainly right, it’s not possible to do this by the GUI. There is a CLI tool, available from the shell, or as a script editor in the GUI, and I should be able to grow a volume from that. Now, all I had to do was to find the correct syntax. I searched through the local help pages. There were no exciting hits for “expanding”, “extending” or “grow”. There were no matching entries in the FAQ. The script editor had a command reference, but without already knowing the correct command, it was useless. After even a bit more googling, I got the correct command line. It’s something like this, note the space and the semicolon at the end.
set logicaldrive ["MyVolumeName"] addCapacity=100 GB;
Or even from the shell:
# SMcli 10.11.12.13 -n our_nice_ibm_box -p secret_password \
-c 'set logicaldrive ["MyVolumeName"] addCapacity=100 GB;'
Trivial when you know it, right? Why on Earth did they not implement a function in the GUI to support this?
For fun, I searched through the online manuals, and finally found a small note at page 96 in “IBM System Storage DS Storage Manager 10, Installation and Support Guide” mentioning the command among best practices using the cli.
No bonus points to IBM. It’s almost as one would think they did it on purpose.
Later today, I found another blog post, telling more or less the same as this one, and with a few noteworthy comments, like how to get a growing progress status – which of course is not visible in the GUI.
Edit: Memo to self:
sudo SMcli 10.11.12.13 -n ibm-box -p secretPassword \
-c 'show logicalDrive ["DataVolumeName"] actionProgress ;'