Adding a drive to the nutanix cluster storage pool | Nutanix Community
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There may come a time when you must expand your cluster storage capacity since you predict more data will be added to the cluster in the near future.

Also, you are already short of space and cannot gain any more space by deleting the old snapshots and removing VM not needed any more, etc.

In that situation, assuming you have empty slots in your hardware chassis and depending on the type of the drive you are adding you will need to follow the instruction in your nutanix portal document titled “Adding a Drive”.

If you do not have any more disk slot on your hardware to, you may have to add a new node to your cluster altogether, so it can expand the capacity of your cluster. This has the benefit of adding memory and cpu resources as well.

Hello,

Can i expand storage with replace existing Disk on node with higher size Disk?

And what pro and kontra if expand capacity with add new node?

 

Thanks,

 

Hendra

@Hendra Yes, you can expand cluster storage by swapping the present smaller size disks with larger ones. You do have to remove the small disk(s) from the cluster first and then introduce the larger capacity disk to the cluster.  As for comparing with adding a node, addition of a node will provide you with more CPU and memory in the cluster as opposed to just storage capacity.  Also, if you are swapping disk, make sure you do it one disk at a time on one node at a time. By that I mean, you should keep the balance of storage on each node. if you swap “disk one on the first node, and then swap the second disk on the second node and so on, and once you are done with all nodes, you can come back to “node one” and perform the same for the second disks on each node. This way the balance of capcity across node will be kept.

 

@sbarab : But best practice from Nutanix to expand capacity as i see on KB was add new node rather than swap old disks. Is there any concern that Nutanix has aware for that solution, let say swap old disks was not HCI concept or other thing? Let say customer don’t have concern about more CPU and memory.

 

Thanks,

 

Hendra

@Hendra I am sure both are valid, but adding a node is more straight forward and contains no restriction with regard to the amount of data you already have in the luster.  Swapping disks is time-consuming and there is always a chance that you may not have enough space on the cluster to remove a disk and maintain data resiliency.

 

I hope this helps a bit.

@sbarab Thanks for your sharing..

Are there any licensing issues with adding additional disks to a cluster?

Must additional licensing be purchased?

@Eric B It really depends on the type of licensing you already have for your cluster.

There are certain license types like “starter”, “pro”, “ultimate” etc, that has to do with different features in your cluster, these do not need any change in licensing if you add disks.

But if you have capacity-based licensing, yes it does require. 

You are best talking to your account team or salesperson to find out about it if you are not sure. Also, check “https://www.nutanix.com/products/software-options”.

 

-Said

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