ESXi 5 & 3TB Seagate HD

[jkconnections]

I'm pretty new to the VMWare ESXi world, so please forgive me if this question is overly basic (I have tried searching but my results keep pulling up answers for ESXi 4 - not ESXi 5).

I'm a home user, trying to learn about ESXi. I recently replaced a hard drive with a 3TB Seagate drive (it's the only one in the computer) and installed ESXi 5. Everything is working fine, I'm able to create virtual machines, etc. However, I noticed that I when trying to create a virtual machine with 2500 GB of space with Thin Provisioning, I get an error dialog box pop up saying, "The disc capacity entered was not a properly formatted number or was out of range. It has been replaced with the nearest acceptable value."

After clicking ok to the dialog box, I see that the value has been reset to 2TB. Currently, I couldn't have more than 40GB of space used by the 2 VMs currently installed. My question is, did I do something wrong when installing ESXi 5? If not, what do I need to do in order to enable a virtual machine to be larger than 2TB?

Thanks!

[eeg3 · Accepted solution]

With VMFS5, datastores can be larger than 2TB but individual vmdks are still limited to the size you are seeing. You could create multiple virtual disks and join them together within the guest if you need a single larger disk presented to the OS.

[jkconnections]

Thanks for the quick reply! So if I create a second virtual disk, how would I go about joining them together into one disk? I'm planinng to install Windows Server on this VM. When you say join them together in the guest, is that something I have to do from Windows once I finish installing it?

[Nikhil_Patwa]

Hi,

Check out the following knowledgebase article from VMware with regards to ESXi 5.0 datastore limits, will enhance your knowledge

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100356...

Hope the information is useful

Nikhil