VM with 20 Tb volume

[ManuG2k]

Hello, I have a local datastore on my server (Dell R510) with 12HD x 2Tb on RAID 5.

Total available space: 20 Tb

I need to create a VM with Windows Server 2012 Standard with one single volume with all space available (20 Tb).

I was thinking to adding more volumes of 2 TB to the VM, then join the disks (with Windows Server Disk Management) into one single volume.

What do you advise to do?

And 'This is the best way to have a VM with one volume with 20 TB?

If my solution is good, the volume on Windows Server is better Striped or Spanned ?

Tnx in advance Manuel

[rickardnobel]

It might be a better idea to create one single 20 TB LUN (if your SAN supports it) and export it to the ESXi hosts.

Then attach it to the VM as a Physical Raw Device Mapping, which will look to Windows as a large local 20 TB drive and no need for any internal guest disk spanning.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

I'd lean to using a physical RDM as well, but keep in mind that RDMs are not officially supported on local storage -

1. kb.vmware.com/kb/1017704
2. kb.vmware.com/kb/1017530

You can work around that by using the console or vCLI to create the RDM.

If the 20 TB of storage won't be used for anything else and you have additional storage in the host you could consider using VMDirectpath to pass through the RAID controller into the VM.