4TB SAN Storage Issue

[vibranze]

Dear All,

Recently my company just purchased an IBM BladeCenter H with 4GB Qlogic FC (QMI2572) and DS3400 (4TB). During the storage adding in ESX4, under Current Disk Layout, available capacity is only 90.85GB instead of total 4TB capacity stated.

I applied all the ESX4 patches, together with the latest Qlogic driver from VMware website without succeed.

Is this a known issue in ESX4 or rather than a configuration issue that I didn't aware of.

Now I'm going to installl ESX3.5U4 to see if the similar issue exists.

Your advice is highly appreciated.

Cheers!

[anh]

Hi

Is the DS3400 on the lastest firmware ?

Regards

Anders Hansen

[jrVMguy]

Take a look at the maximum size of the data store that you can present to ESX. I believe that has a limit of 2TB-512MB, so create a datastore of about 1.9TB and see if that works for you.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

It is not possible to have a LUN greater than 2TBs - 512bytes. This is within the maximum guide for ESX 4. However, you can have > 2 TB VMFSs by using extents to join multiple LUNs together. Not generall recommended as more than one LUN actually gives better performance.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009

Virtualization Practice Analyst[/url]
Now Available: 'VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security'[/url]
Also available 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise'[/url]
[url=http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Blog_Roll]SearchVMware Pro[/url]|Blue Gears[/url]|Top Virtualization Security Links[/url]|
[url=http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization_Security_Round_Table_Podcast]Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast[/url]

[jrVMguy]

Thanks Texi, that's what I remember from the documents I have read in preparation for migrating to vSphere.

That is the same restriction that ESX 3.5 has.

[vibranze]

Hi Anh,

Yes, it's on the latest firmware.

[vibranze]

Thanks jrVMguy & Texi, appreciated your information on the ESX LUN limitation for v4 & v3.5.

Cheers!