Extending a VMFS datastore

The Expanding/growing a VMFS datastore recipe discusses the method involved in increasing the size of a datastore on the same LUN backing the VMFS volume, which is only possible if the LUN has unused free space on it.

You can run into a situation wherein there is no unused space on the LUN backing the VMFS volume, but your datastore ran out of space. Fortunately, vSphere supports spanning of the VMFS volume onto a new LUN. This process of spanning a VMFS volume on to another LUN is called "extending a VMFS datastore". In this chapter, we will learn two methods that can be used to extend a datastore onto a new RAW LUN.

Getting ready

To get started with this recipe, we need to:

• Present a new blank LUN to the ESXi host

• Issue a re-scan on the HBAs

• Make a note of the following:

  • The NAA ID, LUN number, and size of the new blank LUN

  • The NAA ID, LUN number, and size of the new blank LUN backing the datastore you are intending to extend

How to do it...

We can extend the size of a...