Fiber Channel Raid Capacity/ Available Size Problem

[acrcadmin]

Good Day Everyone,

I hope someone can help me. We have a dell power edge 2950 with a qlogic qla2432 HBA installed in it. We are running vmware 3i. I am using the vmware infrastructure client. The HBA connects us to an apple xserve raid which is completely empty and waiting to be formatted by vmware. To verify this I deleted both array's already on the xserve and recreated them. The problem I have is when I try to add the new storage storage each of the two arrays show a capacity of 2.73 TB, but only 756.53 GB available for VM to format. This is according to the infrastructure client. Honestly I am at my wits end, any suggestions? I have attached a screen shot in case my words to not accurately convey the problem. Thanks again all.

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the VMware Community forums. ESX is limited to a 2 TB LUN so you'll want to break your LUN into 2 and then present it back to the host. What do you have planed for the storage space and do you plan to share the storage with other host? A few things

1) In general it's a good idea to limit LUNs to 300 - 600 GB and run between 10 - 15 VMs per LUN. You can go with larger LUNs and more VMs but in the previous is a good starting point.

2) Do you plan to use VMDK larger that 256 GB? If so then you'll want to change the block size when you format the LUN.

3) If you plan to use the entire LUN for a single VM, you might want to consider a raw device mapping (RDM).

[acrcadmin]

Hmm, that just goes to show that if you are knee deep in a problem long enough you are likely to overlook the obvious. I already have one raid running a 2 terabyte LUN for that exact reason on another dell power edge.

And, as a result the block size suggestion is duely noted.

I was planning on breaking my two 2.73 terabyte xserve raids into 4 1.3 terabyte virtual disks and leave the rest for page file and so forth, but i got so hung up and frustrated with my above stated issue I lost site of that.

I feel pretty silly.

I'll create some smaller array's tomorrow morning and let you know what happens.

Thank you very kindly for you helpful remark.

[acrcadmin]

Dave for president! If this were not the internet I would hug you.

Anyway problem solved, I have my LUNs and Arrays setup exactly as I had planned. Of course it is as you said, they were merely too big. Thanks for the timely and astute advice sir.