Hi,
I've recently buy a new server and I would like to install vmware esxi 3.5 update 2 installable. The installation work, but when I want to make datastore he doesn't give me all the capacity of my drive. Here is my specs
Dell PowerEdge PE2950 with 2 Quad core xeon E5430, 16Gb of RAM and four 750Go SATA II configurated in one virtual disk on RAID 5 for a total of 3 TB.
In the VMWARE infrastructure client, I look in the storage adapter and he detect 1 disk (vmhba1) of 2.05TB so he miss 1TB but that I think it's the version of ESXi who's able to only 2.0TB, correct my if I'm wrong.
And when I want to configure the storage, I add new storage, I choose Disk/LUN, and my disk capacity is 2.05TB but available only 46.5Gb. Why the available space isn't near 2.05TB.
Did I need another version of VMWARE server, or did I need to split my array in 2 virtual disk of 1.5TB
Thanks
You will need to split your disks up into RAID sets with less than 2 TB -ESX and ESXi only supports a maximum LUN size of 2 TB see . Also if you set the 4 disks in a RAID5 config you should have only gotten 2.25 TB os usable space - RAID 5 will be 3 usable disks with one spare -
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Your post has been moved to the ESXi forum
Dave Mishchenko
VMware Communities User Moderator
You will need to split your disks up into RAID sets with less than 2 TB -ESX and ESXi only supports a maximum LUN size of 2 TB see . Also if you set the 4 disks in a RAID5 config you should have only gotten 2.25 TB os usable space - RAID 5 will be 3 usable disks with one spare -
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You'r right about RAID 5, I forgot that 1 disk isn't count for disk space. So I have a total of 2.25TB, I will delete my array and recreate with 2 disk. For VMWARE server, what is the best block size should I put?
And for the other question, why even If ESXi detect only 2TB, with my LUN available space is only 46GB?
*EDIT*
I made new array with 512k block size with 2 logical drive of 1.2TB each. The ESXi view all my drive and all the space is available for datastore.
Thanks
512kByte stripe width, you mean?
That might mean you're going to be straddling two stripes when you're performing disk I/O, depending on how you align the start of the VMFS3 partition on that system. IIRC we still only plan for a maximum stripe width of 128 kBytes.
As for detecting 46 GB, that may have been a high-bit truncation:
2048 GB (2 TB) + 46 GB = 2.0449 TB. With some helpful rounding, that's 2.05 TB, as you mentioned in your original post.
If you don't mind me going a bit off topic, would you know why the LUN limit is 2 TB?
Short answer is that hitting or crossing the 2 TB boundary means that the total sector (512 Byte blocks) count for the device can no longer fit in an unsigned 32 bit integer.
The Officially Supported (caps-S definition here) limit is 2047 GB (2 TB minus 1 GB -or- 4294967296 minus 2097152 sectors), and the mathematical limit is something like 2^32 - 2 total sectors (4294967296 minus 2 sectors).
All Byte counts above are in 210 (kiB) values not 103 (thousand Byte), i.e., reality not hard-drive marketing numbers.