Server config:
VMWare ESX 4.0.0 Update 1
SuperMicro SuperServer 6025B SATA motherboard
Intel E5405 2.0GHz 64-bit quad-core CPU
8GB DDR2 ECC RAM
AMCC 3Ware 9690-SA Storage Controller with latest firmware (that
supports VMWare 4.0.0 Update 1) and ESX drivers installed.
Disks 0 and 1 are 1TB disks. Disks 2-5 are 2TB disks. The 2TB disks
were previously used with Windows and had GUID partition tables, but now
I want to use them with VMWare. This is causing me problems I think.
I created a 1 TB RAID1 volumne out of Disks 0 and 1, and installed
VMWare on that, and my first Datastore is on the remaining space on that
volume. I then created a RAID10 volume out of the 4 disks for 4TB
total space. It is initializing via background initialization so it is
immediately available via the controller.
I then attempted to create a datastore on that volume. I got various
complaints from the GUI, including "Failed to get partition information"
and "object is not set to an instance of an object" as I tried to click
my way through.
I did a bit of searching and saw an article on how to create partitions
manually. But fdisk was complaining about GUID partition tables, and
even after I created the partition and rebooted I wasn't able to find a
device in /vmfs to actually create the filesystem on.
So I thought I'd blow away the partition table entirely, so I used 'dd'
to kill the copies of the GUID partition table at the beginning and end
of the disk.
Now ESX doesn't complain, but it says that the capacity of the disk is
3.64TB and the available space is 1.64 TB. However there is no
partition table at this point, and 'fdisk -u /dev/sdb' shows the full
capacity of the volume.
What am I doing wrong?
