Completely replacing (upgrading) a RAID 5 array of disks on an ESXi server

Posted by jshin47 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by jshin47
Published on 2012-11-08T21:50:08Z Indexed on 2012/11/08 23:03 UTC
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vmware-esxi

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hard-drive

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raid5

I have a development server that runs several VM on ESXi 5. It has an array of disks in the RAID 5 configuration where all of the disks are currently the same size. I would like to expand storage on this box greatly, but I am not sure what the smartest way to go about this would be. My current plan is to:

Turn off all VM
Copy VM folders from server to another location
Verify that I can mount all the VM on the new location (ie that the copy went ok)
Replace all the disks with new, bigger ones
Reinstall ESXi5
Copy the VM back over

This seems like it might take a while to accomplish and is not terribly slick, especially since I will have to reconfigure ESXi 5, but is there a smarter alternative?

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