Hi there, so I am trying to create a hard disk or a Virtual disk in a Virtual Machine in order to setup the VM as a file server. The datastore is a Promise VTrak M610P and I have setup the vtrak as a VMFS5 type with 5.46TB of space (4 drives 2TB each in raid 5). In the VM, I added a hard disk and selected the vtrak datastore and attempted to set the provisioned size at 5.46TB and type Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed, but I get a DiskCapControl error with some range value. I change the provisioned size to 4TB and it accepted the new hard disk. I can't find anything about the actual limit on creating hard disk in a VM.
I am running a Supermicro X7DAL-E server with VMware ESXi 5.5 U2.
Any ideas would be helpful. Thank you.
I forgot I asked a similar questions on another section of the forum (shame on me), but I found a solution. Please see the following post Re: Access SMB Storage using esxi host and manage with MS server 2008
Below is what I wrote on the link above:
So as it turns out, there seems to be something wrong with vClient when Adding a Hard Disk (Virtual Disk) to a VM of size larger than 4TB. The article VMware KB: Value out of range error message when adding disks larger than 4TB in vSphere Client describes that if you come across this problem, to add the hard disk via vSphere CLI, Power CLI or vmkfstools. So this seems to be a known issue on vClient. What I ended up doing was using vClient, creating the hard disk, adding it to the VM (size of hard disk is 5.45TB) and when I would get the error about the DiskCapControl out of range, I would just click OK and then finalizing the creating of the hard disk on the VM. Once the process is done, I selected the VM and noticed that it did in fact added a new hard disk of size 5.45TB even though it complained about it. I fired up the VM with windows server 2008 R2 installed and was able to create a new drive on windows and set it up as a shared drive on the network. Seems like vClient needs to be updated by VMware and fix this bug, if it is a bug which I think so. Thank you for the help vervoort!
You can basically use the complete space of a datastore to provision VMs. However, keep in mind that - in addition to virtual disk files - there are other files which require disk space, such as metadata/configuration files as well as swap files and snapshots. I can't tell you whether there's a limitation due to your Promise system though.
To be able to provision large virtual disks, you will also need to ensure that the VM configured with the correct hardware version (compatibility mode) and a supported virtual disk controller.
André
I forgot I asked a similar questions on another section of the forum (shame on me), but I found a solution. Please see the following post Re: Access SMB Storage using esxi host and manage with MS server 2008
Below is what I wrote on the link above:
So as it turns out, there seems to be something wrong with vClient when Adding a Hard Disk (Virtual Disk) to a VM of size larger than 4TB. The article VMware KB: Value out of range error message when adding disks larger than 4TB in vSphere Client describes that if you come across this problem, to add the hard disk via vSphere CLI, Power CLI or vmkfstools. So this seems to be a known issue on vClient. What I ended up doing was using vClient, creating the hard disk, adding it to the VM (size of hard disk is 5.45TB) and when I would get the error about the DiskCapControl out of range, I would just click OK and then finalizing the creating of the hard disk on the VM. Once the process is done, I selected the VM and noticed that it did in fact added a new hard disk of size 5.45TB even though it complained about it. I fired up the VM with windows server 2008 R2 installed and was able to create a new drive on windows and set it up as a shared drive on the network. Seems like vClient needs to be updated by VMware and fix this bug, if it is a bug which I think so. Thank you for the help vervoort!
