SAN Expansion

[jwcrabtree]

I am kinda new at the VM Ware thing and am looking for some help...

We are running ESXi 4.0 on a Dell Blade. Originally, there was a 250 GB LUN created to house the VM's on our SAN. Recently, we added additional storage to the SAN and want to add some VM's to the blade. I have expanded the LUN by 200 GB making it 450 GB, but ESXi doesnt see the new space. I think it is because I didn't expand the file system out to the full size, but left it as it was since I didn't want to loose data. If I expand the capacity to the full 450 GB, will ESXi be able to adjust on the fly with out loosing any data? We have several Virtual Servers running and a small file store.

We also want to add a 750 GB drive to an existing server, but when I create the drive and tell it to use RAW mappings, it fails and says the file size is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore VM Server. Any ideas on this?

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Forums - To answer you questin it is no problem to increase a VMFS datastore - check out page 98 of on how to do it

In regards to the inability to create the RDM - I believe the issue has to do with the Block size used when creating the VMFS datastore you are wanting to store the RDM file on - it was probably created with the default block size of 1 MB which limits the size of the file to 256 GB - even though the RDM is not that large it still will be listed as 750 GB thus causing this error - you will need to place the RDM on a VMFS datastore created with 4 MB block which will allow for a max file of 1024 MB -

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[jwcrabtree]

OK-Guess I need to create a new LUN, add it and then make sure it is configured with the larger block size. Then I can move ALL my VM's to this LUN.

Thanks!!