vSphere 5.5UP2 DL580 G5 Standalone Local Datastore

[bheusmann]

I'm having an issue with a local datastore on a lab server vSphere 5.5U2 installation. The server has 8 drives, 2 x 146GB and 6 x 500GB on P400 RAID controller. vSphere 5.5 is installed on the 2 RAID 0+1 drives and I have a RAID 5 array with 2.3TB of space. I cannot get the vSphere to add the 2.3TB local datastore? Is there a 2TB limit, or am I missing something? I've re-created the RAID array a few times with no change. I was considering adding openfiler on top of the vSphere install and presenting it as NAS or iSCSI. Thoughts? Thanks.

-B

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

This issue is most likely related to the driver for the P400 controller. Please take a look at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006942. The article is related to ESXi 5.0 as well as ESXi 5.1, but I think ESXi 5.5 is just not mentioned because it doesn't officially support the DL580 G5 anymore.

André

[bheusmann]

Thank you. I looked but I suppose my search term wasn't quite correct. Do you know if a firmware update would help this situation? I'd hate to loose 500GB of space by creating 2 RAID 5 arrays, but if that's the only way I suppose it has to be done.

-B

[a_p_]

Unless I misunderstand the information in the KB, it's the logical volume size which matters, i.e. not the RAID size. What you may do is to use HP's ACU (Array Configuration Utility), create a single RAID5 set, on which you then create two logical volumes. This way you will end up with two datastores, but you will not loose any disk space.

André

[bheusmann]

Ahh that makes sense. I'll give it a try. Thanks for the info.

-B