Datastore Increase Button Grayed out.

[Ferdi201110141]

Hi,

I have a Dell R410 server with 4 x 2TB sata drives on a h700 controller in raid 0 config. I have created virual disks inside the raid configure tool each of 2TB and one of 1.2. I installed esxi 4.1.0 and created one Datastore called Datastore1 using 1 of the luns. I have now started to run out of space and would like to increase Datastore1 to 4TB by useing a second lun. But the increase button under the properties of Datastore1 is grayed out.

If I add the 2nd lun as a seprate datastore of 2tb it works fine and I can increase that datastore size just not the oregionals datastore.

Is there a way I can increase Datastore1 size or get the increase button to be not crayed out?

Regards

Ferdi

[kjb007]

2 TB is the max size for a LUN.  The only way to increase beyond that on your first datastore would be to use an extent.

-KjB

[cmacmillan]

Take a screenshot of the Datastore's properties showing the greyed-out Increase... button. The additional information therein will shed some light on the subject.

It has been said that a single LUN may not exceed 2TB and this is due to a SCSI limitation within VMware. The datastore however - as noted above - can be expanded through the use of extents (concatenation of LUNs) but there must be room on the first/primary LUN to do so. If your VMFS volume is 100% full, you may have difficulty extending it.

You might try removing snapshots, logs, etc on the primary datastore and try again.

[bulletprooffool]

hi,

the maximum size of your Lun depends on the block size that you have configured.

If you have an 8MB block size, you can extend to 2TB (minus 512b)

If the current datastore is 1TB, or 500GB and can't extend further, I suspect that you have a block size of 4BM, or 2MB configured.

You'll have to svMotion all of your VM off of this Datastore, then scratch and recreate it.

[cmacmillan]

Confusing datastore with single file size limits? The limit on extents is 32 physical devices.With 1MB block size that results in about 50TB of volume with 32 extents. With 2MB and larger block sizes, your feasible limit is 64TB per datastore. Adding one extent should not be a problem, except if the volume is full... see this note on how to deal with that condition:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm#href=server_config/t_increase_vmfs_da...

Cheers!

[Ferdi201110141]

Hi,

Thanks for the Replies sorry I might have not stated my question correctly. I do not want to increase my LUN I'm aware of the 2TB limit. I want to extend my First Datastore1 by adding a second lun to it. But the increase button is grayed out as per screenshot. As per my first post I have about 4 x 2TB lun's and 1 x 1.2TB lun over the 4 sata drives running in a Raid 0 confifuration.

Regards

Ferdi

[DCjay]

Hello Ferdi,

You can not extend local disk LUN.

Jay

[Ferdi201110141]

Hi Jay,

No I can't as there is a 2TB limit on lun size that VMware can read. My LUN's are already 2TB, I wich to extent my Datastore to Use 2 LUN's instead of the single lun it is using at the moment.

Regards

Ferdi

[Ferdi201110141]

Hi cmacmillan,

I have seen that article and have tried the following.

1. Logged in to the host it self and not the vCenter server

2. Restarted the Management Agent on the Host

3. Recanned all volumes and devices.

All of these steps still resulted in the increase button grayed out as per previous screen shot.

Ferdi

[kjb007]

Since you can create a 2nd datastore and increase that just fine, another option would be to create a new volume with the remaining LUNs, and move the data from the 1st datastore to the new LUNs, and then try to add the first LUN to the 2nd datastore after it has been emptied.

-KjB