ESXi

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  • 1.  Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 22, 2010 10:57 AM

    Hello. I am very new with all this so any assistance is greatly appreciated. We are using VSphere ESXi 4.1 and VSphere client.

    On the server we are using, I have 2 groups of three 600 Gb drives in a raid 5, so after raid they are effectively about 1.2 Tb each.

    On this server, I want to run two instances of Windows. There are two data stores created now, using all the available disk space within each raid group (so they show about 1.09 Tb each datastore).

    I would like to assign 750 Gb in one datastore to a Windows instance, but that leaves approximately 350 Gb left doing nothing. I would like to use that 350 Gb for the other datastore.

    I don't seem to be able to increase the datastore to use the left over 350 Gb from the other datastore. Is this possible? Thanks for your help.



  • 2.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 22, 2010 12:10 PM

    If you right click on your DataCenter in vcenter, and choose "Rescan for Datastores", select Scan for new storage devices and scan for new vmfs volumes", do you see your ~350gb presented when choosing "Add a new datastore"?



  • 3.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 22, 2010 01:26 PM

    Hi,

    If you have created the datastores using the max size of disk array, so you cannot extend the datastores.

    If you have created a VM on each datastore, using just 750GB for virtual disks, so you have about 350GB free to create new virtual disks and new VMs into that datastore.

    You cannot expand a datastore using the free space of another datastore. One approach that might be useful is to extend the first datastore in order to join to the second datastore and get one big datastore. In order to accomplish this, the second disk array must be clean (none VMFS datastore created).

    Remember you must to create just one datastore for each disk array or LUN.




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  • 4.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 22, 2010 02:51 PM

    I misunderstood your question: pcerda is correct in that you cannot use a portion of an active datastore to extend the avaiable space on another datastore. Sorry :smileysad:



  • 5.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 22, 2010 05:35 PM

    Thanks for the very helpful info. I was able to create one large data store (in test) using both logical disks. I am going ahead and initializing the two partitions to completely erase any residual VMFS file data, and once that's done, will recreate this store and load the two instances of Windows. The goal here will be one host with 750GB and the other with approximately 1.44 TB. Probably won't be able to get back to this till Monday but this is all a huge help. Thanks.



  • 6.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 23, 2010 07:44 AM

    RAID-5 on three disks is generally pretty poor since RAID-5 has a 4 IO write penalty - i.e., the random write performance is less than that of a single drive. For the cost of only one more drive's capacity, I'd be inclinded to run RAID-10 across all six drives, which will have the random write performance of 3 drives in that sense.

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  • 7.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 25, 2010 10:27 AM

    Hi,

    Please clarify something about this...we experimented when first setting up making a single virtual drive by putting all 8 drives in a raid 6 (about 3.2TB after overhead), but after install of the ESXi OS, the data store only read 1.2TB of available space. We bought our license through Dell so using them for tech support, the technician told me ESXi could only see up to 2TB in any given disk space, and suggested we break the set of 6 drives into two raid 5's and use a raid 1 on two remaining drives for the ESXi OS.

    Is there a way to make ESXi see above the 2TB limit Dell stated exists? I would prefer to go that route if it's feasible. Thanks for your help.



  • 8.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 25, 2010 11:47 AM

    Hi again,

    Yes, 2TB is the maximum that ESX will see. Here are the config maximums.

    http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_config_max.pdf



  • 9.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 25, 2010 12:38 PM

    Okay...thanks much for your help.



  • 10.  RE: Data Store Disk Size

    Posted Oct 25, 2010 01:16 PM

    Hi,

    You can get a VMFS Datastore with up 64TB of space using extents of datastores. You can link up 32 LUNs of 2TB each, creating one big datastore with up 64TB.

    Check out this link:

    http://professionalvmware.com/2009/01/to-extend-or-not-to-extend-that-is-the-question/




    Regards / Saludos

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    Patricio Cerda !http://www.images.wisestamp.com/linkedin.png!

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    Si encuentras que esta o cualquier otra respuesta ha sido de utilidad, vótalas. Gracias.

    If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer helpful or correct. Thank you.