How does ESXi 4.x recognize a second raid in a machine

[tommyfr]

I am fairly new to this, so please point me to the proper forum is this is not the place.

I have a physical machine with two raids.

Raid #1 is a raid1 setup on which the ESXi 4.x is installed, and works fine.

Raid #2 is a raid5 with 2tb of data.

I need some direction on how to make this raid #2 available in vSphere. I'm just not seeing how that works.

Direction, hints, clues, all appreciated.

Thanks

Tom

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

prior to ESXi 5.0 the versions only supported LUN/disk sizes of up to 2 TB minus 512 bytes. You may need to split the RAID5 set into multiple smaller logical disks. Btw. if all the disks have the same size, I'd recommend you create only one RAID5 set with multiple logical volumes. The first on for ESXi with ~10 GB.

André

[tommyfr]

The physical machine has a pair of 300g 2.5inch drives built in which I am using for the basic OS.

Secondary storage is currently raid5, 4 drives, 650g each, hitting right under 2tb (1.79).

There is also space for a second set of 4 drives, which I'd like to use later.

I could ignore the 300g pair and just use the raid5 set, but I sort of hate to just waste that. And if I add the second set of 4 drives later, I'd still need to know how to add that in.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Basically all you need to do to add your RAID set is to set it up using the controller's RAID utilities (i.e. create a logical volume) and then use the "Add Storage" wizard in the vSphere Client to create a VMFS datastore on the new volume.

André

[RParker]

tommyfr wrote:

I am fairly new to this, so please point me to the proper forum is this is not the place.

I have a physical machine with two raids.

Raid #1 is a raid1 setup on which the ESXi 4.x is installed, and works fine.

Raid #2 is a raid5 with 2tb of data.

I need some direction on how to make this raid #2 available in vSphere. I'm just not seeing how that works.

Direction, hints, clues, all appreciated.

Thanks

Tom

I know conventional wisdom says to split the RAID, but ESX does not need ANY IOPS to manage  VM's.  So you are wasting spindle count.  Reconfigure the host, make it one BIG RAID and you don't need to split off the host OS as a separate partition, that is a waste of space AND performance needed for VM

[tommyfr]

Thanks Andre' and others for the replies.

I wasn't familiar with vSphere and the 'add storage' option. That is exactly what I wanted and now I can see how to plan this thing out.

Tom