ESXi 4.1: how use 18TB

[ingrtx]

ESXi 4.1 can create one 180GB partition out of the 18TB it shows Storage Adpators:Config tab.

But no matter what block size we use, we cannot get more the 180GB in that first datastore, and then we cannot, under Storage:Config:Add Storage, add any more datastores.

The "add storage" function doesn't show the 18TB as available.

[vmroyale]

Hello.

You will need to carve the 18TB storage up into 2TB-512 byte or smaller chunks. There is a 2TB-512bytes limit that is detailed in kb 3371739.

Good Luck!

[RParker]

If you don't want to make LUN's make it NFS store, and you can use ALL 18TB at once... but that's your choice.

[ingrtx]

The problem is that VMWare Linux uses a MS DOS FAT partition table.

You can create 3 normal partitions, and 1 extended partition.  So now you try to create more partitions in the extended partition. The limit is the aggregate number of sectors supported by the partiton table.

So we dropped VMWare as large file store and installed Open-E DSS6 (which is also Linux).  DSS supports what we wanted:  10 x 2TB data drives, 1 x 2TB RAID5 parity drive, and 1 x 2TB global hot spare.

[DSTAVERT]

VMware isn't Linux and the limitation is based on SCSI 2 limits.