Extent limit

[Kahonu]

Aloha,

We have a SAN (Lefthand) volume on an ESX 3.02 that we are trying to extend. It already has four extents. We do the rescan and try to Add Extent. When doing so, no additional storage shows as available. We ran into this before where we couldn't add anything beyond a 4th extent. Is this a VMWare limit?

Mahalo,

Bill

[weinstein5]

something else muct be going on - I believe the extent limit is 16 total extents

[Kahonu]

Any ideas what?? We are following the same exact procedure that we did in creating the previous extents.

[weinstein5]

And simple question and you have LUNs available that do not contain VMFS datastores?

[Kahonu]

I am not sure what you are asking.

[Troy_Clavell]

taken from this document

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_301_201_san_cfg.pdf

A VMFS volume can be extended over 32 physical storage extents, including SAN

LUNs and local storage.

[weinstein5]

Only LUNs, local and on the a SAN, that are not formatted as VMFS dtastores can be used for extents - so unfomratted LUNs or LUNs formatted with non-VMFS filesystems are usable -

and I stand corrected a maximum of 32 extents -

[Kahonu]

Lert me add another piece of information. When we look at config/storage adapters, the listed capacity of the LUN does include the size of the extent we are trying to add.

[weinstein5]

I think I might know what is going on maybe - where are you trying to add the extents? are you doing through the ESX Host or htrought the SAN? What size does the extent show up as? The largest VMFS datastore you can create with out using ESX extents is 2 TB -

[Kahonu]

I am trying to add the extent in Virtual Infrastructure Client. I select the host then Configuration. When I select Storage Adapters, the capacity of the LUN in question includes the extent we are trying to create. But when we go into Storage, then do a rescan then Add Extent - nothing shows.

In the properties of the LUN, it shows the four extents we are now using as Primary Partitions. I remember from DOS days a disk can only have four primary partitions. Is there any significance/corelation here?

[weinstein5]

On the LUN how are you adding the extent? - Because I think you are right about the number of partitions - because I think what you are doing is creating partitions on the LUN - when you go to the configuration and add storage after you have added the extent (partition?) it shows up as space available to add as an extent to the VMFS datastore - when you add the fifth portion it is not accessable because you are limited to four primary partition --

Can you add another LUN to your SAN?

Also best practice is when you use LUN for a VMFS datastore it should be one VMFS partition on the LUN

[kjb007]

To be sure, can you paste a screenshot of the LUN you are talking about in your post?

If you've added an extent, and just not seeing the added space, then you've reached a bug. I have used extents, and everytime I've added a new extent to an existing datastore, the only way I can get it to show up correctly, is by rebooting the host. Especially if there are multiple hosts connecting to it.

This is one of those times where I have to say you may need a reboot.

-KjB