Multiple datastores in 1 hard disk

[joelau007]

Hi,

I'm doing this as a experiment. I have a 40GB empty harddisk.

First, create a datastore, specify 10GB.

After that, try to create a new datastore again. The same harddisk won't show up to select.

But if I try to increase the datastore, it works. So this means I can't have more than 1 datastore in a harddisk.

Any idea why Vmware design it this way ?

[f10 · Accepted solution]

VMware strongly recommends creating a single vmfs volume on a single partition hence the GUI does not allow you to create multiple datastores on the single lun. This is by design to reduce scsi2 reservations.

You can however use vmkfstools command to create multiple vmfs datastores on a single lun.

[joelau007]

Yes I guess there must be a reason for not doing this. I can only see this useful in certain test environment limited to 1 local hard disk. Example create a "employee1-datastore" and "employee2-datastore" in the same hard disk.