1. Both drives can be added at the same time. 2. iDRAC is not the easiest way to do this. Unless this is your only access to the server, use OMSA from within the OS. 3. The process will not be automatic. Once the drives are showing in a READY status, you will need to go to OMSA, Storage, PERC, Virtual Disks, and choose Reconfigure from the dropdown menu of Available Tasks for the RAID 5. (Actually peforming the reconfigure/expansion was the "vital step" you left out of your list ;).) 4. Yes. Are your existing disks 1.2TB SAS drives?
Hi,   We've got a Dell poweredge R530 server, currently with 5 hot swap drives installed with RAID 5 configured. I need to increase the disk space for our virtual machines, so have purchased an additional x2 1.2TB SAS drives to install. What's the correct process for adding 2 new drives to the array and increasing disk space available within windows server 2012 R2? Could someone sanity check the process below please:   1. install the 2 new drives whilst the server is powered on and functioning as normal. (Do I need to install 1 drive and wait for a period of time, or can both drives be installed straight after the other?) 2. Go to dell iDRAC and confirm visibility of the 2 new drives. 3. Wait until the drives have successfully been added to the array by monitoring the status via iDRAC 4. Go into Storage management within server 2012 R2 to allocate the new space to the virtual machine partitions.   Is above correct? It feels like I'm missing out a vital step, it can't be that simple to allocate additional storage space on a live production server?   Any advice appreciated [IMAGE]   Thanks
dell poweredge r530 - increase disk space