Can Only Add 1 Datastore in ESXi 5

[nhjonesy]

I installed ESXi 5.0 U1 on a new Dell PowerEdge T320.  It is installed on a USB disk so I could reserve the 3-disk RAID 5 array to my heart's desire.  The array is 1.8TB and ESX sees it fine.  I'm able to create a datastore (using either VMFS3 or 5) using a fraction of the space available (e.g. 250GB), but when I attempt to create a 2nd datastore, the Add Storage --> Select Disk/LUN window is blank.  I can delete the one datastore and can keep going back in to create one, but one is all I can do. Anyone have a thought on why this is happening?

Thanks.

[Nuwanalwis]

Let me clear my self about what you did.

From total of 1.8TB internal disk you created 250GB disk Group? and you want to use the rest of the space mount as another Data Store is it?

The reason you fail to see the rest of the local disk is the interface on client to add new disk does not scans the internal disks. it only scans the external interfaces such as FC, iSCSI.

By login dirctly to esx console allow you to see local disks so you could add another partitions which needs some skils.

As i think this is done to prevent changes on the local file system that could cause ESX to fail, after the installation. (After the installation is a key word here...! meaning you can crate a custom disk layout during the installation.)

Hope i answered your question.

Good Luck....!

NJ

[nhjonesy]

Thank you for the tip.  I did not check the disk layout or attempt to create additional partitions from the command line at the time I had that problem, but when I get back there I will do that.  I deleted the datastore and created a new one using the full size of the array, just to see if I would have any issues there, and now I cannot delete the datastore from the GUI (client) or the partition using the command line, I think it says it is read only.  So I am wrestling with that right now.  But it seems odd that I can't create multiple datastores on a single logical drive from the GUI, pretty sure I've done that in v4.1 but this is my first go at v5.0 U1. 

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

The reason the GUI doesn't list a LUN with an already existing partition is that VMware supports only a single VMFS partition (datastore) on a LUN. There might be workarounds to create multiple datastores on a single LUN from the command line, but you should rather consider to split the RAID into several logical volumes if you want/need smaller datastores.

André

[nhjonesy]

Ok, that makes sense.  Not even sure what I was thinking anyway to create multiple datastores...

Thanks to both of you for your help.