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zemotard
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Add extend

Hi, is it possible to add several extend partition to a datastore ?

Because I have a datastore extended one time, and I wish to extend it again, but the space available is not visible ...

Regards

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Ripley8
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It's possible to have up to 32 extents to a VMFS, just not recommended. About the only 'acceptable' extent would be to increse the size of the LUN holding your initial VMFS and use the extra space for the extent.

The recommendation is to create a new VMFS of the correct size and move everything there. Of course if your VMFS is up to the 2TB limit then an extent or a new, independand VMFS will be the only way to go.

How big is your VMFS?

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esiebert7625
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Sure you can create multiple extents, when I first setup ESX I created a 20GB volume and added 3 additional 20GB extents to it for a total of 80GB. You need to first scan for new Storage Devices and then once the host sees the LUN go to the existing VMFS volume properties and then click Add Extent.

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Ripley8
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It's possible to have up to 32 extents to a VMFS, just not recommended. About the only 'acceptable' extent would be to increse the size of the LUN holding your initial VMFS and use the extra space for the extent.

The recommendation is to create a new VMFS of the correct size and move everything there. Of course if your VMFS is up to the 2TB limit then an extent or a new, independand VMFS will be the only way to go.

How big is your VMFS?

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zemotard
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It's a small datastore ...

Other question, is it possible to vmdk from a datastore to another without downtime ? With vmotion for example ?

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Dave_Mishchenko
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Vmotion assumes that the VM is staying on the same datastore. You could try the hot clone feature of VMware Converter.

http://www.vmware.com/support/converter/doc/releasenotes_conv3.html

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=636312

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esiebert7625
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I'd be careful using Converter to simply move a VM to another datastore. It has the potential to cause problems on the destination VM, especially when hot cloning. You're better off just doing a cold migration. Or if you snapshot the VM which will cease any writes to the original vmdk file of the file, you should be able to use scp or vmkfstools to copy it to another datastore. You would have to shutdown the VM to remove the existing hard drive and add a new one in the new location though. Same with Converter you have to shutdown the source server to bring up the destination server, you also have to re-configure your NIC's on the destination server since they do not get migrated.

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hicksj
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Technically it is possible to hot migrate a VMDK from one datastore to another, but this currently requires a special circumstance: Migrating the VM from ESX2.5 to ESX3 with Virtual Center 2.

It doesn't make much sense that this be limited to "upgrades" only, so hopefully we'll see this VC2 feature extended to ESX3-ESX3 migrations very soon.

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paulcio
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So I extended an existing lun, then ran the rescan saw the size updated. Migrated all of my hosts off of the existing VM and did the 'add extent'. Now the datastore shows up with the correct size, but shows all of the new storage as 'used'?

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paulcio
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eep, disregard, another rescan seems to have fixed it

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williambishop
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Methinks a lot of us will be happy soon, from what I hear.

--"Non Temetis Messor."
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