Expanding a Perc5i Raid5

[Jeremy Cole]

> It seems, that the perc5i and perc6i controllers are not able  to divide
> one raid into more than one virtual disks.
> Therefore I have to create a second raid array (loosing an additional
> disk for parity) label it with parted as gpt,
> and than I can expand this disk.

That's not true.  The PERC 5/i is perfectly capable of dividing a RAID 5 
set into multiple virtual disks.  In fact, this is how I solved your 
problem above.  I installed onto a 6x750GB PE 2950 by making a smallish 
vdisk for boot, and the rest for data.  Install the OS on the small one, 
once Linux is up and running, it could care less about the size of other 
volumes.

major minor  #blocks  name

    8     0   52428800 sda
    8     1     104391 sda1
    8     2   52323705 sda2
    8    16 3607756800 sdb
    8    17 3607756766 sdb1

sda = ~50GB, MBR partitioned
sda1 = ~100MB for /boot
sda2 = ~49.9GB for LVM VG "small"

small/root = ~40GB for /
small/swap0 = ~2GB for swap
small/swap1 = ~2GB for swap

sdb = ~3.3TB, GPT partitioned
sda1 = ~3.3TB for LVM VG "large"

large/data = ~3.3TB for /data


You should be able to do something similarly, although I couldn't say 
whether you can do that without re-initializing your disks, as I did 
this from scratch.

Regards,

Jeremy

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