Extending a disk beyond it's limit of 2 TB

[makumar]

Extending a disk beyond it's limit of 2 TB.

I have a situation where customer want to extend the drive by 400 GB, current size of the disk is 1880 GB. It has a limitation of 2 TB to extend. What will happen if i try forcefully to extend the disk? Will data inside the disk will get corrupted?

[a_p_]

If it's not supported for whatever reason, doing it forcefully (if that even works) will be a risk that I wouldn't want to have in a production environment.

Anyway, what exactly is the reason for the 2TB limit that you are seeing? Is it an old ESXi, or VMFS version, is it the storage that runs out of disk space, or is it even the guest operating system's partition table (MBR vs. GPT)?

André

[continuum]

>> What will happen if i try forcefully to extend the disk? Will data inside the disk will get corrupted?

That depends. If you extend the vmdk while the VM is powered off - then ESXi will complain when if the 2TB limit is caused by the VMFS-version.
That means that the data will not get corrupted - if you can revert the change.
Any expand operation while the VM is powered on can have serious effects - dont even attempt it.

Please answer Andres questions - if we think that it is safe to expand the vmdk we can help.

Ulli

[atbnet]

Hi makumar,

What version of vCenter, ESXi, and VMFS are you using?

And are you trying to do this via the flash or HTML web client?

Since vSphere 6.5 it has been possible to hot extend a VMDK beyond 2TB without needing to power off the VM.

https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2018/05/31/unable-to-extend-your-vms-disk-past-2tb-without-po...

Thanks,

Andy