Making a 3TB or 4TB disk drive for Windows 2008 Server?

[stratolynne]

We have a user requirement for a 3TB or 4 TB disk drive for a Windows 2008 server.  We are currently running VMware vSphere 4.0

We have 8 physical drives that were put into 4 LUNs each with 1.57GBs.  Could these LUNs be put into a MetaLUN to create this disk drive?  Is there any restriction on the size that a disk can be?  Any other better suggestions to get this done?

Thanks!

[vmroyale]

Hello.

The largest VMDK or RDM you can have is 2TB - 512bytes, so you would be looking at presenting multiple disks to Windows and then spanning them within the OS to pull this off.  Are you using direct attached storage here?  If you have iSCSI you could create a large volume and mount it within the guest using the iSCSI initiator.  Another thing to think about is how you plan to back this server up.

Good Luck!

[stratolynne]

Thanks for reply.

Is the 2TB constraint in vSphere 4.1 too?

[Troy_Clavell]

2TB minus 512bytes to be exact.

Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere 4.1

[DSTAVERT]

I would use DFS to re-create your folder/shares structure spread over multiple VMDKs on multiple datastores.

Use an external iSCSI device connected directly in the OS with a 5 TB LUN etc.