Full capacity of JBOD doesn't show up

[novicesx]

Hi folks,

We just installed ESX on a new Sunfire x4170 server and connected it with a Sunfire JBOD 4200 with 12 TB capacity. We installed the adaptec disk utility to create RAID 5 and set it to Build/ Verify state.

Now when I do a fdisk -l, the /dev/sdc disk shows 9 TB, however when I create a partition of VMFS filesystem, it takes only 2 TB.

I used the vmkfstools command to create a vmfs3 filesystem and it shows 2TB.

Any idea on what's could be wrong with my setup?

Thanks in advance!

[MentholMoose]

A VMFS volume can be up to ~64TB, but each extent can only be ~2TB (with 32 extents per volume). So if you want one 9TB VMFS volume, you will need to split that array into partitions smaller than 2TB, and add each partition as an extent into the VMFS volume. The extent size can vary within a volume so you can do 4x 2TB partitions (technically should be 2TB - 512B) and 1x 1TB partition.

See the Configuration Maximums document.

[novicesx]

The JBOD 4200 connected to our ESX has 12TB capacity with 1TB for each disk, now if I couple 3 disks each using RAID 5 configuration, I cannot fully utilize my storage space.

Is there any way to use the maximum available storage capacity?

Thanks in advance.

[a_p_]

I don't know how the Sunfire and your JBOD internally work, however I think you will at least have the capabilities like other RAID controllers.

If so I'd suggest you create a RAID5 (or RAID6) with all 12 disks, then - using your RAID management SW - create virtual disks on this RAID array and present theses virtual disks to your ESX servers.

The single virtual disks have to be less than 2TB - 512 Bytes (which is the maximum for a single ESX datastore).

On the ESX you can decide to run multiple datastores (which I recommend) or create one datastore and add all other virtual disks as extends to this datastore.

André

[proden20]

Can you create VMFS extents?

[AWo]

You can

• create a VMFS partition of 2 TB max.

• you can create extends (to get a larger VMFS store)

If you present each 2 TB chunk as a LUN you will also have more I/O queues available.

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

Author @ vmwire.net

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[TomHowarth · Accepted solution]

You can create extents, however beaware that this is in effect similar to creating a RAID0 array, you loosed on LUN you will loose all your data. it would be more sensible to create a single JBOD and slice it into sizes more suitable to your needs, calculate your VM disk needs and create your lun sizes appropiately. if you store all your VM;s on a single LUN you run the risk of SCSI locking with will serverly degrade the performance of your infrastructure

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author on "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://www.amazon.co.uk/VMware-VSphere-Virtual-Infrastructure-Security/dp/0137158009/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256146240&sr=1-1]”.

[MentholMoose]

I didn't say anything about changing the array configuration to RAID 5. If you want to use the full capacity of the array, you have to create several partitions (e.g. using fdisk create /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdc2, and so on) less than 2TB each, and add each one as an extent to build the VMFS volume. As other posters mentioned, there are downsides to doing this.

[novicesx]

Following the recommendations from all you folks, we created five different arrays with different RAID level based on our VM needs and everything went on smooth.

Yes, there was a risk of having a RAID 0 on the whole storage if I had put them as extents.

We figured out our priorities and everything is working like a charm

Thank you all