Hardware

Greetings:

I am writing this from a SAN perspective so apologies in advance if I misinterpret any of the storage foundations areas.

We have a Clariion CX500 with attached hosts of Windows clients and Sun solaris. We dual HBA all hosts and path management is PowerPath on all.

We expand LUN's on the SAN side for Windows hosts often. I am able to then run disk manager in windows, the partition sees the "expanded area of space" and I can then simply right-click and "extend volume" from the expanded LUN, use as much space as I want and it works just like that. No data lost, no reformats, easy going.

We have a Solaris 10 server with Storage Foundations installed (ver 5.1 I believe) and we are having extensive issues with our unix staff regarding expanding LUN's once issued. In this case I had initially issued a 1TB LUN and feedback from the unix staff was Solaris picks it up fine and it was brought under the storage foundations control (file system, etc). According to them all was great and we can dynamically grow this at any point we wish.

Next was I expanded that 1TB lun to 1.5TB. At this point I have received conficting feedback from the unix sys admin that Solaris saw it, Solaris didnt see it, Veritas can expand it to this is not possible via any volume manager to dynamically grows LUN's as we wish.

First off, based on the Solaris scenario above, what would be the proper steps to take in the initial 1TB LUN in regards to Solaris and storage foundations? Next, what would be the proper steps after the 1TB is brought under and ready and the LUN is expanded to 1.5TB? Can this be done without any type of reformat and is this process destructive in nature? Would it ever be possible this is easily done in Windows but not possible in Solaris/Storage foundations?? (NOT saying it cannot be done, I am asking how).

NOTE: Currently the storage foundations was downloaded and installed, I would say there is 99% chance this is a 'trial version' at this time. Does that impact this?

Feedback is greatly appreciated as we need to be 100% comfortable we can expand LUN's down the road that are currently issued to existing attached Solaris hosts.

Many thanks in advance!!!