VMWare ESXi Only Recognizes 800GB of a 2.7TB RAID on a 3Wire 9650SE Card

[x0054]

Hi all,

I have a white box server with a 3Wire 9650SE card with 4 1TB drives in a RAID 5 Array. That results in a 2.7 TB Array. I installed the latest drivers for the card per instructions here (), and now my ESXi 4.0 installation can see the Array! However, it shows the capacity as 2.7TB, but only 800GB free. Why? I SSHed into the server and used fdisk to look at the array, and surprisingly, fdisk also only shows the capacity of the array to be 800GB. What's wrong? Any ideas?

- Bogdan

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Welcome to the VMware Community forums. ESXi has a LUN limit of 2 TB and when the array presented to the host is larger ESXi will truncate 2 TB chunks from it. Are you able to create multiple arrays with the 3ware controller? With some controller you can do that so you can split the drives into multiple arrays (each less than 2 TB).

[AntonVZhbankov]

Maximum supported LUN size is 2TB-512B, soy you have to split your array into smaller pieces, less than 2TB-512B each.

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[x0054]

Got you, that's really annoying. Is there a way to give one of the guests raw access to a PCI buss or the RAID controller. So I can have the actual virtual machine access the RAID directly?

Thanks,

- Bogdan

[patrickds]

You can use Raw Device Mapping to the LUN in the VM, but that has the same 2TB-512B limit.

The only option here is to make sure your LUNs do not exceed that limit.

[DSTAVERT]

2 TB is the limit per LUN. You can create multiple LUNs and extend the datastore. Cofiguration/Storage/Properties/Increase

[patrickds]

Just checked the users guide for your controller, and it supports carving up your array into multiple storage units, and creating a separate 'boot volume''

Best way to go about this would be to create a boot volume of about 10-15GB for installing ESX, and let the remaining space be divided into two volumes, which would be about 1.3TB each.

You could even make it 3 900GB volumes, if you're not going to create VMs with large VMDKs, and don't want to run too many VMs from the same VMFS volume.

I don't know the recommended maximum number of VMs on one vmfs volume for ESX 4, but in 3 it was 10, and i guess this wouldn't have changed much since the VMFS is still the same version.