Unable to expand volume

ubern00b · 6 Mar 2015 at 10:07

Hi all

I have a LUN on a server that ran out of disk space and so I increased the size of the LUN and tried to expand it from within Windows (2008 R2) but receive a "there is insufficient space to expand the volume".

I have done some investigation and it seems I need a third party tool to be able to expand this as diskpart or disk manager simply won't work.

Does anyone know of a free third party partition manager that would accomplish what I need to do? Something like GParted is not an option as this is an iSCSI LUN so won't be seen outside of Windows.

Thanks in advance!

ubern00b · 6 Mar 2015 at 11:37

Yes, have rescanned many times, the LUN shows the additional space that can be expanded but because there is 0MB free, it isn't allowing it to expand.

ubern00b · 6 Mar 2015 at 11:47

it is a DAG server in an Exchange estate hosting a mailbox database. It is not the active mount so if push comes to shove I could wipe the LUN and re-replicate the data but that is a bit extreme and I am 99% sure my boss will not be happy with that as a "solution". So, trying to find an alternative.

ubern00b · 6 Mar 2015 at 12:18

Oh I see, no we don't have anything like that in place. This server is a member of a 3 node DAG all running from an HP Lefthand P4000 SAN, the other 2 DAG members expanded their storage just fine (but they had at least 1MB of free space) but this one is being a pain.

I could try reboot the server and see if it releases any space on the LUN. Always loath to reboot in scenarios like this in case it doesn't come back up for any reason.

Also to answer your questions earlier it is a VM (ESXi 5.5) and backend storage is as explained above.

ubern00b · 6 Mar 2015 at 16:24

Managed to expand the LUN by stopping the Exchange Indexer Search Service, moving the oldest and largest .ci file off the LUN and then expanding it, move the file back and restart the service. Simples!