Best way to make use of 3tb hard disk?

[fireflye]

Hello, First post so be gentle with me.

I've got a HP microserver with ESXi booting off a USB flash drive and the supplied 250GB hard disk housing the VMs.

I've just got hold of a 3TB hard disk and I'd like to know what is the best way to present all of it to a Ubuntu server VM. I've created a single 3TB datastore but realised there's a 2TB limit on VMDKs so I was thinking of creating two separate vmdks and and combining them using linux LVM into a single volume.

Seems a bit of a kludge though, is there a more elegant way of presenting an entire 3tb disk to a VM?

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

unfortunately as of now, virtual disks are still limited to 2TB minus 512bytes, so the option you mentioned would be a way to do this. Please make sure you keep some free disk space on the datastore in case you need to create e.g. a snapshot, ...

There are some blog posts which show how to present local disks as RDMs and if you want to take the risk you may take a look at them.

André

[fireflye]

Thanks, I've gone down the LVM route and it seems to be working fine. I was fully expecting large vmdk support to be introduced with 5.1 so it was quite disappointing that this limitation is still in place, especially now 4TB disks are on the market.