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jduino
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"Add storage" for 3ware 9690 shows 2TB capacity but only 47GB available

I have ESXi 4.0.0 installed onto a 1TB drive. The system also has a 3ware 9690SA in RAID5 with 4x750GB drives.

it tooks some time but I was able to install the drivers via vSphere Client following the KB steps, then I rebooted.

Back in vSphere Client I select the server, select Configuration->Storage, then "Add storage..."

I go thru the steps, it shows 2.0TB capacity, but when I get to "Current disk layout" it only shows 47GB available!

Any suggestions/ideas what gives? Why can't I get the full 2TB??

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AntonVZhbankov
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I suppose there is actually 2TB + 47GB. You need to create 2TB-512B LUN, not even a byte more.


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VMware vExpert '2009

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EMCCAe, HPE ASE, MCITP: SA+VA, VCP 3/4/5, VMware vExpert XO (14 stars)
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AntonVZhbankov
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I suppose there is actually 2TB + 47GB. You need to create 2TB-512B LUN, not even a byte more.


---

VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

EMCCAe, HPE ASE, MCITP: SA+VA, VCP 3/4/5, VMware vExpert XO (14 stars)
VMUG Russia Leader
http://t.me/beerpanda
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jduino
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Hmmm I'm not entirely sure how/where to do that. Do that OUTSIDE vmware? In the process that I describe it won't let me create anything more than the 47GB.

With the drives I have (750G) in RAID5 I should have 2.25TB, minus whatever overhead, etc. Am I not supposed to RAID the drives at the card level? I'm so confused on what should be a simple drive addition. Maybe I'll drop back to ESXi 3.5 and see what that does?

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DSTAVERT
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You need to recreate the array at the controller level. I don't know whether you can create logical drives at the controller level but if you can create a 2GB logical drive for ESXi and then as Anton said create one at 2TB-512bytes. If you can't create logical drives then create the array no bigger than 2TB minus 512bytes

3.5 will not be any different

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jduino
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OK, that makes sense. I'll give that a shot this afternoon and report back. Thanks to both of you!

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jduino
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That did the trick, thank you! 3Ware uses "autocarving" to break it into multiple LUNs at some predetermined size point.

In VI I see two volumes/LUNs. I add the first one, then select its Properties and extend it using the second to get the full size back as a single datastore.

I just assumed a 64-bit operating system would handle the >2TB....silly me!

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DSTAVERT
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Since you can make smaller lumps make a 2GB one just for the ESXi OS. Then create the additional ones for the datastore. It will give you piece of mind for updates and overwriting of the datastore.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
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AntonVZhbankov
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This is SCSI-2 limitation, ESX 4.0 still uses SCSI-2 for storage.


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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

EMCCAe, HPE ASE, MCITP: SA+VA, VCP 3/4/5, VMware vExpert XO (14 stars)
VMUG Russia Leader
http://t.me/beerpanda
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jduino
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Good idea, but no can do for two reasons:

1) ESXi 4.0 cannot be loaded on the 9690 as the boot drive (yet). It doesn't have the drivers in the distribution so you have to load them AFTER the install as an update/patch via the CLI. I assume that will change soon.

2) 3ware only allows LUN creation by their autocarve. You set a threshold size, and anything larger than that gets carved into the next lun, and keeps doing so until the disk is used up. Kinda a bummer. I like the cards performance/price-wise, but they still aren't a full-fledged server environment card.

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jduino
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I see, thanks for the info.

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vsu
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1) ESXi 4.0 cannot be loaded on the 9690 as the boot drive (yet). It doesn't have the drivers in the distribution so you have to load them AFTER the install as an update/patch via the CLI.

There is another way to add drivers, described at , but it is officially unsupported. I did not try yet to install the system with a custom oem.tgz and switch to the patch later.

2) 3ware only allows LUN creation by their autocarve. You set a threshold size, and anything larger than that gets carved into the next lun, and keeps doing so until the disk is used up.

This is not completely true:

1) There is a "Boot Volume" option even in the 3ware BIOS - with this option you can set a special size for the first volume, and the rest will be carved as specified in the autocarve size.

2) If you boot into a Linux rescue environment (e.g., RIPLinux) and run tw_cli, you can specify up to 4 custom volume sizes:

/cx add type=RaidType disk=... vol=a:b:c:d

(the vol= parameter specifies volume sizes in GB).

Actually, the tw_cli way should be much better than creating arrays in BIOS, because currently (with codesets 9.5.2 and 9.5.1.1) carving in BIOS is done in a dumb way - it does not align volumes to RAID chunks (volume size is always (n102410242 - 1) sectors), therefore the second and subsequent volumes may have lower performance. Using the vol=... parameter and volume sizes less than 2048 GB avoids this (volume size in sectors will be n102410242). But autocarving produces broken alignment even in tw_cli.

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