I am evaluating VMware ESXi to host a SAP development environment. I really like the concept and the vSphere client.

However, we ran into one big problem that would be a showstopper for us: The 8MB block size limit for VMFS3.

Basically, we would like to use a 5TB RAID array, but the 8 MB limit reduces our available disk size down to 1.5GB. I looked around for a solution, but I couldn't find one so far. Ideally, we would like to give the entire RAID to the VM.

I understand that we can use LUNs in larger environments, but we want an "all-in-one" box.

Hardware:

Adaptec 5820 RAID

6x 2TB HD

32 GB RAM

Is there an undocumented option to increase the block size to at least 16MB? Any other options?

Thanks,

Jens