Combining Virtual Disks?

[DMaksakov]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to VMware so I'm sorry if this has been answered before but I couldn't find it via the search fields.

I have set up ESXi 5.1 on a new server with an attached MSA containing 12 x 3TB drives in a RAID-6 array. The datastore is 28.51 TB total.

After creating a new VM I needed 20.5 TB total so, after researching the maximum 2 TB limit, I created 11 virtual disks. (Disk 0 = 500 GB, Disk 1-10 = 2TB).

I installed Server 2008 and formatted Disk 0 during the OS install.

Now in Disk Management it shows Disk 0 as my OS (C:) with 500 GB and Disk 1-Disk 11 as unallocated 2TB drives.

I'm trying to make my 😧 drive the rest of the 20 TB so I created a New Simple Volume on Disk 1 and tried to Extend it choosing Disk 2-11 as the space to use.

This is the error I get: The volume cannot be extended because the number of clusters will exceed the maximum number of clusters supported by the file system.

What am I doing wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

D

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - I do not think this is an issue with VMware but with Windows OS  and its ability to span that number of disks -

[DMaksakov]

Is there a way for me to combine the .vmdk files I have into ones larger than 2TB?

[weinstein5]

The only real way would be to install ESXi 5.5 which supports virtual disks to 62 TB in size - https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r55/vsphere-55-configuration-maximums.pdf