3TB Drive Added esxi 4 does not see the capacity??

[mphilli7823]

I just added a new 3TB Hitachi SATA drive to my system, which I was planning on using as a backup drive. The BIOS of the server which is a Dell Poweredge 1900 correctly displays the size of the drive as 3000GB, however when I go into storage adapters view in esxi it lists the drive as following:

If you notice it shows the disks capacity as 0.00 B, and of course if I try to add a volume to this I can't becase esxi does not recognize the drive as having any space. So what gives?? Is ESXi 4 capable of using a single 3TB drive?

[DSTAVERT]

ESX(i) has a maximum LUN size of 2TB-512 bytes.

[DSTAVERT]

You may be able to break up the disk at the array controller with Virtual Disks but ????

[admin]

If you have a PERC controller, I would advise by breaking it up into adressible storage no greater than VMFS volume extent, which is currently 2.0TB.  You can always "paste" them back together w/ extents after.   I would also be sure to ask Dell if their BIOS really supports 3TB drives, because after 2 TB support varies widely.  That is why you are seeing the emergence of UEFI BIOS (finally).

[mphilli7823]

I am about 99.99% sure that the issue is the fact that esx(i) can only see a volume of 2 TB, the thing that was throwing me for a loop is that at my job in our production environment we configured a 5.11 TB LUN and presented it to a virtual machine as an RDM.

So I logged a ticket today with vmware support and they did in fact confirm that 2 TB is the largest LUN size, and I would have to split the 3TB drive up into some smaller sizes and then use extents to get the full 3TB. He also confirmed that our production setup which "somehow" does see the single 5TB LUN is not supported.

Once I get home I will try out everyones suggestions of splitting it up via the RAID controller, but at this point I am sure that it is going to fix the issue. Once I test it out, I will post it here. Thanks!!

[Josh26]

Hi,

Actually the LUN limit is 2TB-512B. This has bitten several forum posters who have created exactly 2TB luns.

[Duncan Epping]

I wouldn't see a reason for extends by the way. Just create 2 or 3 LUNs and leave it at that. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. If something happens with an extend it will only be more difficult to recover.

Duncan (VCDX)

Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive

[admin]

I can see a few reasons:

1.  He just wants to manage one VMFS volume rather than 2-3.

2.  When GPT partitions come out (that is if :)) you can migrate the same file structure to the new VMFS without having to change anything.

Since I was suggesting concatting LUNS within a single drive, the potential loss of an extent would generally fall in the failure domain of the drive, so this doesn't really add any substantial risk.  As of vSphere only the head extent needs to be online, and I have many customers that use extents and have never lost one.  I am not saying this is not a possibility, however the failure domain has been reduced in 4.  Since the metadata is captive, recovering bouts of online/offline is reliable within the scope of a single extent VMFS volume.

In most arrays now, LUNs being presented are virtual not physical RAID volumes, so loosing a virtual LUN would probably be tragic using extents or not.

If you have an array now using vStorage (VAAI), ATS is used rather than SCSI2 so locking events go down dramatically and scalability using extents reduces the VM/LUN issue that is a real limiter these days.

[admin]

yep. correct on 2tb-512 for VMFS/RDM.  Don't want unsuspecting folks to follow on that.

ESX 3 and 4 use VMFS 3 which has the 32 bit limit.