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getut
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HP DL370 G6 0.00 B capacity

I have a brand new HP DL370 G6 with a Smart Array P410i controller and 16 300GB SAS drives.

I am trying to do a fresh install of ESXi 4.1 on the machine and have created a single RAID 50 volume using all drives except for 1 as spare. The volume size is around 3 + TB but every time I try to install, ESXi tells me it sees the volume but there is 0.00 B available and that the selected disk does not meet the minimum space requirements for ESXi 4.1.0. Please select a disk that has a capacity greater than 943718400 bytes.

I have been able to sucessfully install if I create a 2 disk RAID 1 volume but then I was in the same boat. Even once ESXi was installed, I couldn't get it to see the rest of the disk space in a volume.

I have read about a 2TB limit, but that limit seemed to be per virtual disk, not for the actual storage location OF those virtual disks.

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Dave_Mishchenko
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The 2 TB (actually 2 TB - 512 B) applies to LUN sizes as well. If you can create a single array and then break the storage into smaller LUNs less than 2 TB. You can then join the LUNs after using extents to create a datastore that uses all of your local storage.




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Dave_Mishchenko
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The 2 TB (actually 2 TB - 512 B) applies to LUN sizes as well. If you can create a single array and then break the storage into smaller LUNs less than 2 TB. You can then join the LUNs after using extents to create a datastore that uses all of your local storage.




Dave

VMware Communities User Moderator

Now available - vSphere Quick Start Guide

Do you have a system or PCI card working with VMDirectPath? Submit your specs to the Unofficial VMDirectPath HCL.

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getut
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Thanks for the quick answer. One additional question though. If I set up 2 LUN's and ESXi has to install on 1 of the 2 LUN's, then how can I reconfigure it to join them together after the fact?

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f10
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You would have to add an extent, read "Increase VMFS Datastores" from the ESXi Configuration Guide which is available at

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f-10

VCP3, VCP4, HPCP, HP UX CSA

Regards, Arun Pandey VCP 3,4,5 | VCAP-DCA | NCDA | HPUX-CSA | http://highoncloud.blogspot.in/ If you found this or other information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful".
a_p_
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As the other posters mentioned, you could add the second LUN as an extent to the VMFS datastore on the first LUN.

However I wouldn't do that. I would create 3 LUNs. One for the Hypervisor (ESXi) with ~10GB (5GB for ESXi and 5 GB for a small datastore to be used for e.g. ISO-Images) and two LUNs on the remaining disk space for use as two separate VMFS datastores.

André

a_p_
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BTW: Make sure your Smart Array P410i controller is equipped with BBWC or FBWC. This is very important for disk performance.

André

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