Hi Everyone, I have an existing VS4000XV enclosure with 8 x 450GB SAS 15k drives installed and in production. The 8 edrives are in a Raid 5 with 1 hot spare. I have carved 2 volumes out of the available space and they are used exclusively by a VSphere cluster supporting around 15 guests at present. Performance has been very good so far but as happens I need to add more hard drive real estate.

I have bought a kit of 8 SAS 450GB 15k drives to fill the empty slots in the enclosure. I have found a lot of info about replacing failed drives but to date have not found any definitive info about adding drives and then adding the resulting free space to existing volumes. My questions then:
1. can I safely add all 8 drives to the this enclosure while it is up and serving data. Everything I have read indicates that this is possible
2. has anyone done this before and if so are there any gotchas
3. Can someone point me in the direction of some doco on expanding the storage pool (there is only 1 at this stage) and then expanding volumes.

Thanks in advance.