After nearly 120 hours (during which I was stressed out, even after confirming a recent backup was solid) I finally just did an ESXi OS restart -- and all is well. Thanks to theflash1932 for giving me some extra courage. Mysteriously the expansion of the virtual disk required a system restart!?!? (I can find NOTHING in any documentation indicating that a PERC H310 firmware-based process requires a system restart.) I've extended many Dell PowerEdge disk arrays (or more often, replaced a failed drive) and none of those ever required system restarts. I am guessing that message PDR54 (disk media error was corrected during recovery) caused VDR47 (disk media error was corrected ) which prevented message VDR24 (Reconfiguration completed.) It was at about 36 hours into the reconfiguration/expansion that VDR47 was issued and the drives stopped being noisy, so I'm guessing they had all re-striped by then. It remains a mystery why was there NEVER a VDR24 message written to the Lifecycle log indicating successful reconfiguration/expansion (even after the system restart). Dell support, are you listening?
I am extending a RAID5 virtual disk (3 1TB physical disks, added 2, so when completed 5 1TB PDs) on a PowerEdge T420 which has a PERC H310 controller. After inserting the new drives and seeing they are Ready (as seen in iDRAC and also in Ctrl-R BIOS), I used the Lifecycle Controller to reconfigure the virtual disk, adding the 2 new physical disks to the RAID5 VD array. I see in the Lifecycle log this message: Virtual Disk 0 on RAID Controller in Slot 6 reconfiguration has started. However, it has been over 24 hours and still no new progress messages. There does not seem to be any way to see the % complete. All I know is the physical disk LED lights are flashing, so I assume that means I/O activity. The iDRAC displays the original capacity of the 3 PD VD, it hasn't updated with the additional capacity. Is there any way to see progress status? What will be the completion message written to the Lifecycle log? Will this ever complete? I am running low on patience and need to get more disk space ASAP.
When Will I know RAID is rebuilt? (Virtual Disk 0 on RAID Controller in Slot 6 
reconfiguration has started)