vSphere 4.0 and HP D2700 drive array

[hansonla]

Hi.  New to the forum - and this may be a noob question.  I have an existing vSphere 4.0 deployment on an HP DL380 G7 with a ton of RAM, a P410 SAS controller, and two 1.4TB datastores.  I have added a D2700 drive bay with 9TB of storage in a RAID5.  Using the HP ACU utility, I broke it up into 5 LUNs - 4 with the maximum 2TB, and the 5th with the leftover space of 191GB.  When I created the LUNs I used the ACU radio button option for maximum MBR partition size = 2TB.  This didn't work - Configuration - Storage - Devices sees the 5 new devices from the D2700, but will only let me add the small LUN of 191GB as a datastore.  I'm guessing the default 2TB HP LUN is slightly too big for the 4.0 vSphere to handle.  So I should have chosen the 'Other' option in the ACU and manually sized the LUNs.  I have found nothing in the documentation on this - has someone run into this or a similar problem?  I'm sure there is a 'magic number' for the max LUN size in bytes on the HP array - please help.

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - The maximum LUN size is not 2 TB but 2 TB -512 B so you might be hitting that limit - try dropping the 4 2 TB LUNs to 1.9 TB and make the 5th to 500 GB and see if that works - 

[markzz]

Just to add a little to this thread.

The 2TB limit is an absolute limit meaning that snapshots are inclusive in the limit.

I would suggest you look at something like a 1.8TB lun meaning you have 200GB - 512B of snapshot space when backing up etc..

If you require more than the 1.8TB you can use volume sets from within the OS or extents which currently on ESXi5 allow for a 16TB volume.

It all gets a bit messy if you need volumes over 1.8TB but it's doable.. The other option is to put the data behind a SAN, you can then present it as an RDM!!