VMware Cloud Community
jezh
Contributor
Contributor

Large disks and data storage

Hi there, I am a newbie to VMs. I have been using it for the last few weeks and am having fun with it!


We are creating some offsie backup for our clients and have a server with 4 x 2TB drives in a RAID5 (5.5TB of usuable space) - Now i know both VMware and windows server 2008 (NTFS) have a max parition size of 2TB. My question is, on the same virtual disk from the array, can  i make a VM of 50gb for windows and then somehow make a 5,45TB datastore using GPT or another way so that i can access it from my VM and use it like a second partition in windows?


if this is not possible is there an alternitive for larger data stores?   

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6 Replies
hostd
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,

I don't think there is a way to present the lun larger than 1.95 tb because even if you present the LUN as an RDM the limitation is 1.95 tb

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hostd
Contributor
Contributor

but you can add an extend to the lun and your datastore can grow upto 64 tb.Smiley Happy

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Sreejesh_D
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

As hostd said we can create a VMFS volume of max 64TB by adding extents.

Please refer the following sections from ESX configuration guide.

Creating and Increasing VMFS Datastores

Increase VMFS Datastores

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Sreejesh_D
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

here's the URL for ESX configuration guilde.

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

hmm, seems like the URL went missing.

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