Expand Commvault Disk Library

My Commvault disk library is nearing 90% capacity, which is a growing cause for concern. The disk library is provided by a Dell MD1400 with 12x6TB SAS drives, which was originally configured as a 10 disk RAID6 set with 2 hot spares (~45TB usable) on the PERC H830 card.

As an intermediate step before purchasing an additional disk shelf, I did the following to give a little breathing room.

  1. Using the Dell Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA), I located one of the hot spare drives and unassigned it.
    Dell OMSA unassign global hot spare
  2. Still within OMSA, I chose the “Reconfigure” option on my Virtual Disk, keeping the RAID level at 6 but adding in the new available capacity.
  3. Then I waited. It took 16 days for the reconfiguration to complete as the RAID6 parity was re-spread/calculated across the set. This left me with a ~50TB virtual disk.
    Dell OMSA virtual disk size
  4. Within Disk Management, I carved the free space into two additional ~3TB volumes, which are mounted within a standard disk library path of L:\DiskLibrary. This size adheres to the recommendations given to us by our professional services partner.
    Disk management showing new volumes
  5. During the original configuration, we used Automated Mount Path Detection, to point to L:\DiskLibrary:
    commvault export storage config example
  6. Due to this, the new mount paths were picked up automatically after about 15 minutes, and appeared within the list of mount paths under the library:
    mount paths on commvault library

Checking the Disk Usage tab on the properties of the library dropped utilization down to 80%, and provided us some time to address the growing data concerns.

 

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