I haven’t banged on about how much I like naviseccli in a little while. I was reading a white paper on FAST VP in the new VNX series recently, and came across the storage pool -expand command. This isn’t so exciting, but the -skipRules option was intriguing. It seems you would use this if you didn’t want to follow all of the rules associated with a normal pool expansion. I inferred from the white paper that by default a FAST VP pool will automatically redistribute its LUNs across the new disks. This may be non-optimal if you’re in the middle of a busy period on the array, and if you don’t want this to happen, you should use the skipRules option.  Note that this is for Release 5.33. If I’ve misunderstood this I’m happy to be corrected.

In any case, here’s an example of how to expand a pool using naviseccli.

storagepool -expand -id poolID| -name poolName-disks disksList [-rtype raidType[-rdrivecountdrivecount]][-initialverify yes|no][-skipRules] [-o]

The RAID types you can select are r_5, r_6 and r_10. This is important if you already have disks of a certain tier type in the pool. The capacity tier (NL-SAS drives) uses RAID 6, the performance tier (SAS drives) uses RAID 5, and the extreme performance tier (Flash drives) is RAID 1/0.

naviseccli -h SP_IPaddress storagepool -expand -id 10 -rtype r_6 -disks 0_2_0 0_2_1 0_2_2 0_2_3 0_2_4 0_2_5 0_2_6 0_2_7 –o