I needed to increase the size of a virtual disk on my Dell MD3000i. The MD3000i provides the storage space for my vSphere VM’s. The interface ‘Modular Disk Storage Manager’ does not provide a way to increase the size. To increase the size you must use the SMcli.exe (command line interface) provided with the Storage Manager client.

From the computer the ‘Modular Disk Storage Manager’ is installed on, open a CMD window and change to the following directory:

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C:\Program Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\client>

From this directory execute the following command (an explanation of the switches is below):

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smcli -n Production_Storage -c "set virtualDisk [\"virtual_disk_name\"] addCapacity=26843545600;" -p "password"

Where Production_Storage is the name of your storage array, virtual_disk_name is the name of the virtual disk to increase, 26843545600 is the amount to increase the virtual disk in bytes (in this case 25GB, use this calculator to convert from GB to Bytes: Convert GB to Bytes), and password is the password to the storage array.

Once the operation is complete you will need to extend the Datastore in vSphere.

Locate the datastore, right-click the datastore, select properties and select the ‘Increase …’ button. Next you should see a selection of available devices and the same LUN should appear, select it and click next. Vsphere should see the additional free space and upon clicking next it will expand the volume.