Thinking about adding a Raid

[citrusfizz]

I have a home ESX server that i use for various things, but i was thinking about making a fileserver out of it too.. in the tune of win2k3 server

i have a raid card an areca 1220 and i found that there are drivers(albiet beta) for esx 3.5 for it. i was thinking of getting about 5 1.5TB hard drives for it and making a raid 5.

i was thinking of formatting it with vmfs and putting a large 5TB virtual disk on it and assigning that to the guest OS.

whats things should i consider when doing this in esx?

[mcowger]

You should consider that > 2TB LUNs are not supported.

--Matt

VCP, vExpert, Unix Geek

[JoJoGabor]

and that Windows cant see a LUN larger than 2TB. Depending on the SAN, you could create a large RAID-5 array and then split that into 2x 2TB LUNs and a 1TB LUN. Format with VMFS ensuring you select the correct block size to enable VMFS of this size, then add a single VMDK on each LUN to use as your data volumes. Leave around 20% space though for VMware overhead