Can you use local disk groups as mapped raw drives

[Westy]

We have a new host with vShere4U1 installed on a couple of mirrored disks. The host will initially be running an SQL server and the OS will be SAN based (fibre) as all our other host VMs are. We do not have enough space on the SAN or budget to upgrade to allow us to run the SQL logs/Db's, so the host was bought with an extra 14 disks (much cheaper) which have been split into two RAID 1+0 disk groups (410Gb & 540Gb)

I can attach the locak disks to the host but it formats as vmfs and the dbo wants to use these disks as raw as he wants to use the whole size and not be restricted to 256GB vmdks within the vmfs.

Is there a way to present the disks within vSphere so they give me the option to attach to the VM as raw disks similar to the san, or any other way.

I am a fairly confident user of ESX without being an expert (typical medium firm sys admin - too many hats) and basic linux so would appreciate some feedback/help.

Host - HP DL160 G6

Cheers

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

If you delete the datastore and choose a larger block size you can have a datastore up to 2TB in a single LUN. If you need to you can extend the the Datastore to 62TB using extents.

You really don't want to use the raw disks. I don't know whether it is possible any more anyway.

[Westy]

Thanks for the quick response. Will do as advised.

[DSTAVERT]

I don't know whether you are using ESX or ESXi but installing ESXi directly to USB or in your case SD is a supported install option. The HP servers have a dedicated internal USB or SD slot just for this purpose. Leave the complete array available for the datastore. Another option with HP is to use the ACU CD or Smartstart disk and create different arrays from the available disk space. A very small mirrored one for ESXi (ESXi only requires 1GB) and the balance in whatever RAID for the balance.

[Westy]

We have 11 esx hosts whose guests all use SAN based storage but this host is a bit of an oddball as it has been bought just to run a couple of SQL's as we did not have the space on the SAN to facilitate them apart from the OS's.

We have used the HP RAID controller to create the esx install disk array using two mirrored disks and the rest of the disks have been used for the two sql arrays. It would have been nice if the SQl guest could have just seen the two disk groups the same as when you present a san lun and be able to use a mapping file but if not possible then have to use your first advise about block sizes.

Thanks for your help