 So this topic's come up a couple times and I was recently asked again by one of my regular clients that I've done some storage consulting with about resizing iSCSI extents in Windows. Now I have a whole video that walks you through the entire step-by-step process of setting up iSCSI in Freenas and how it attaches to Windows. So I'll leave a link to that for the full process. This is a shorter video that assumes you have it connected and you have it working and you go you know I want to make it bigger and because well we all want to make it bigger. So let's go over here and we're going to look at the storage settings and how this is set up. So it's all set up with the associated target I called it when resized because this is the setup for this specific demo. I'm running Freenas 11.2 U4 but I know U5 is out around the corner but I don't think there's any changes in the iSCSI for that. So we're going to go to pools and to keep it simple I put SCSI extents under the SCSI data set just kind of makes it easier but you can do it however you want and it's a Zevol set to 251.96 gigs. Now let's go over here in Windows and I copied just a few files over there and I got the disk management open and you can see it's 249 as presented to the operating system here. But let's say it gets full we have our files on it and we need to expand it make it bigger. It's not too hard to do but I did learn doing some testing before they made this video. If you corrupt a partition Windows sometimes gets really mad and likes to hang thinking about it so I do recommend doing this with Windows off. If you're curious what happens with Windows on Windows hangs a lot because the partition can corrupt it. The way an iSCSI is presented is a logical block device to the operating system you're presenting it to through Linux through Windows whichever you're attaching the client machine for the iSCSI and it will get mad if you have it on because you're actually modifying a hard drive when it's on it's a very unexpected condition because most operating systems expect the hard drive to be consistent if it's presented as a block device to the operating system. So we're going to edit ZVOL we have our current ZVOL at 250 and like I said we do have some files on it those 3D printer files you see let's make it a 550 gig we can really type in anything we can even well let's go all out just make it a two terabytes you know is why not make it a lot bigger. So now we have a two terabyte partition save now what has just happened is the data that was on there still right where we left it. So that should be fine always back up before you do this things go wrong you can have a typo if you shrink a volume by the way you definitely you'll get a prompt and freeing asset this will cause data corruption etc etc so shrinking no don't do that not a good idea going to fire up windows again and now we have our much larger partition but it's not all there and we'll cover that one second so if we go over here we go to this PC we can still think it's still the data is still there those files and everything located in it but it's still only 250 so now we just got to expand it now good news is windows let you do this you could do this other file managers and things like that but it is available to be done in windows I think we just need to go to extend volume they do have a shrink option I don't know what happened if you shrunk it in there but we're going to go ahead and do this select this finish it's going to think done it's now expanded to its full size of two terabytes and there's the data still there size changed that said it's really pretty simple it works much the same way in Linux as well so if you're mountainous or Linux you do have to go through whichever discutility of your choice to do an expansion on there if there's enough requests maybe I'll do one for Linux but I don't think as many Linux systems have eyes because he presented to them they're usually done with other methodologies but for windows wise eyes because he popular will really simple you often will have a storage server in this case of free Nass and instead of creating a massively big if you're virtualizing windows which is very popular as well even on the servers when you want to do sharing and you I want all the windows features I want all the functionality and permissions and everything I don't want to try to use a separate Nass you present that to the VM as ice because it's not a good idea to create some massive partition to manage presenting it as ice because he also makes it very simple when you swap servers you could just reattach that ice because he to another machine because it presents as a lodges logical block device and as I stated it's as simple as changing it over so we move this over to another computer it's still going to be the same partition so whenever you have to reset up a windows machine it's there plus having the ice because he on the back end with free Nass you get all the cool stuff like the snapshotting and stuff like that so I have covered that before so if you have an ice because you have a snapshot of it and something happens all your data on there you can just roll back to a previous snapshot now as I said it's presented and managing it as a block device there for any of the data can't be seen by free Nass you don't get that granular restore but you do get snapshots and that's important because when you're looking at this and those cover real quick just make sure we're clear on this when you look at it from this spot it has no idea what's inside here it's going this is a ZVAL presented as a block device so there's not any easy simple methodology it doesn't see folders inside of it it doesn't see the data inside of it it's just a ZVAL block device presented via ice because he so case you're wondering but I have another video I'll link to and how to get this all set up configured but resizing is that simple you just expand it and well you don't shrink it that's gonna be bad we'll try it real quick and see what I'm curious what will happen I didn't try this I know it'll probably make windows very mad though I know when you do some changes while it's live it gets mad so let's shut down windows first and we'll see what happens when we shrink okay so we'll let you shrink it in here because as shrinking is evils not allowed through the user interface I guess we could go command line into it but I kind of get the idea and like I said I have no windows gets angry when you try to manipulate a block device while it's on her it seemed to cause windows to pause and depending on what is all going on it may or may not cause data corruption alright that's it like I said leave a link to the whole how to get set up with ice-cazi but it's that simple to expand an ice-cazi volume and it works fine in windows it's just a few steps thanks thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post if you want to hire us for a project that you seen or discussed in this video head over to Lawrence systems dot com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us also if you want to carry on the discussion further head over to forums at Lawrence systems dot com where we can keep the conversation going and if you want to help the channel out in other ways we offer affiliate 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