Storage limitations

[miikkeeb]

Hello,

I am running ESX 3.5 at a satelite office. Because it is a small office I only have the one node and do not have shared storage. Because of the lack of shared storage I had ordered my server to come with over 1tb of on board storage. I have a guest VM created and I am trying to assign another disk to it. The disk I want to assign needs to be 350gb but inside of VMware I can only assign up to 256gb. Is there any way around this?

[Troy_Clavell]

This is probably how your presented the disk. It's a block size issue. Check your storage and see how it's presented. You will have to reformat and present the storage at 2MB atleast.

1MB=256GB

2MB=512GB

4MB=1024GB

8MB=2048GG

[weinstein5]

If this is the vmfs datastore created during install the defaul block size is 1 MB which means the largest file is 256 GB - you will have to remove this datastore and readd it increasing block size to 2 MB allowing got a max file of 512 MB -

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[miikkeeb]

Yes I am pretty sure this is the datastore that was created while installing VMWare. Since this is the default datastore and the only datastore that was created on that box is there any way to change that block size on the box without completely reinstalling VMWare?

[weinstein5]

you should be able to remove the datastore and readd setting the block size without reinstalling ESX

[miikkeeb]

I am guessing the recommended would be to make sure I have a backup copy of the guest machines that are currently running on this host before I try doing this?

[weinstein5]

definitely! Did not realize you had running VMs as this will destroy all the data

[miikkeeb]

ok thank you very much. I will give this a try.