: Increase Storage on the M-Series Appliance
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Increase Storage on the M-Series Appliance

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Increase Storage on the M-Series Appliance

After you Perform Initial Configuration of the M-Series Appliance, you can increase log storage capacity of the appliance by upgrading the existing drive pairs to larger capacity drives or by installing additional drive pairs in empty drive bays. For example, you can choose to upgrade the existing 1TB drives to 2TB on an M-500 appliance, or you can add 2TB drives to the empty drive bays (B1 through D2).
The M-Series appliances leverage RAID 1 for data redundancy in the event of disk failure. Therefore, the pair of drives in a RAID 1 array need to be identical. However, you are free to mix drive capacities across different RAID 1 arrays. For example, the drives in the A1/A2 RAID 1 array can be 1TB drives, and the drives in the B1/B2 RAID 1 array can be 2TB drives.
The following table lists the maximum number of drive bays (disks) and the available drive capacities supported on M-Series appliances.
Because each drive pair (A1/A2 for example) is in a RAID 1 array, the total storage capacity is half of the total drives installed. For example, if an M-500 appliance has 2TB drives installed in drive bays A1/A2 and B1/B2, the A1/A2 array provides 2TB total storage and the B1/B2 array provides another 2TB for a total of 4TB.
Appliance
Number of Supported Drive Bays (Disks)
Supported Drive Capacity
M-200 Appliance
4
8TB
M-500 Appliance
24
1TB or 2TB
M-600 Appliance
12
8TB
Before expanding log storage capacity, Determine Panorama Log Storage Requirements. If you need more log storage than a single M-Series appliance supports, you can add Dedicated Log Collectors (see Configure a Managed Collector) or you can Configure Log Forwarding from Panorama to External Destinations.
You don’t need to take the M-Series appliance offline to expand the storage when adding drives to an M-Series appliance that is already deployed. When the additional drives are configurable and available, the M-Series appliance redistributes the logs among all available drives. This log redistribution process happens in the background and does not impact uptime or the availability of the M-Series appliance. However, the process does diminish the maximum logging rate. The Redistribution State column (PanoramaCollector Groups) indicates the completion status of the process as a percentage.