VMWare ESXi and Storage Question

dawks

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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I'm a bit of an ESXi and *nix newb, so this has me a little confused. I'm setting up a new server that has 4x1tb drives in RAID 5 for 3.65TB in storage. Installed ESXi to that RAID array, but vSphere is only reporting 1.6tb storage for the datastore. Whats going on?

http://twitpic.com/3vkfu7/full

How can I make the full storage available?
 

Cruisin1

Golden Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Thats just what your vmware install is using. All the other RAW storage is still there for you to use for virtual machines.
 

dawks

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,071
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Thats just what your vmware install is using. All the other RAW storage is still there for you to use for virtual machines.

Even if the data store says its only 1.6TB? I can still use ~3.5TB?
 

dawks

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,071
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81
Another question, on another server I have running ESXi, when I reboot ESXi, the Guest OS's don't start automatically. In the configuration option, they are set to not start automatically, but I don't have the option to change that. You can see in the screen shot, the 'Edit' button is grey'ed out. I read on one forum post you I might need higher privileges, but I'm loggin in as root, and haven't configured other accounts. Any suggestions?
http://twitpic.com/3vkqat/full
 

tomt4535

Golden Member
Jan 4, 2004
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Another question, on another server I have running ESXi, when I reboot ESXi, the Guest OS's don't start automatically. In the configuration option, they are set to not start automatically, but I don't have the option to change that. You can see in the screen shot, the 'Edit' button is grey'ed out. I read on one forum post you I might need higher privileges, but I'm loggin in as root, and haven't configured other accounts. Any suggestions?
http://twitpic.com/3vkqat/full

Try clicking Move Up untill the VM is under the Automatic Startup category. The edit button should become available then.
 

Chiefcrowe

Diamond Member
Sep 15, 2008
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It looks like you have a dos partition for some reason? you may just have to repartition/format that volume but i'm not sure...
 

yinan

Golden Member
Jan 12, 2007
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ESX/i does not support greater than 2TB - 512 VMFS or RDM volumes. There is a rumor that much larger volumes will be supported in ESXi 5.
 

dawks

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,071
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It looks like you have a dos partition for some reason? you may just have to repartition/format that volume but i'm not sure...

Yea, I'm not sure whats going on with that. I created the RAID array, then installed ESXi. All the partitions on there were setup by ESXi (and theres no option to change it during install that I can see).

ESX/i does not support greater than 2TB - 512 VMFS or RDM volumes. There is a rumor that much larger volumes will be supported in ESXi 5.

So this is what the problem is..? Any way I could partition the drive so I could have multiple data stores at least? Or just roll with it as is, then hope for support for in 5?
 

dawks

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,071
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Try clicking Move Up untill the VM is under the Automatic Startup category. The edit button should become available then.

Oh man, that was it, thanks. So silly! I didn't even notice they were categorized like that. i was just noticing the 'Start up' column said 'Disabled'.
 

yinan

Golden Member
Jan 12, 2007
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5 will probably be out late this year.

To use all of the storage you will need a RAID controller that can do LUN carving to create volumes less than 2TB-512b.
 

GhettoFob

Diamond Member
Apr 27, 2001
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You can use extents to glue together multiple <2TB volumes if you absolutely need a volume >2TB. It's usually not worth the trouble though and I'm not sure if this applies to local disks. From what I've heard, this limit will still be in ESX 5/VMFS 5.
 

yinan

Golden Member
Jan 12, 2007
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You can use extents to glue together multiple <2TB volumes if you absolutely need a volume >2TB. It's usually not worth the trouble though and I'm not sure if this applies to local disks. From what I've heard, this limit will still be in ESX 5/VMFS 5.

It will not be the limit in ESX5. The limit will be something like 54TB. Odd number but it is what it is supposed to be.
 

Paperlantern

Platinum Member
Apr 26, 2003
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Most people have made some good suggestions here, I dont have much else to add on that note, I just noticed something about the original post that was odd. RAID 5 four 1TB drives should add up to about 2.7 some odd TB, how did you get a 3.65TB volume? The only way i see that is with RAID 0. Maybe this is effecting some of the available storage?
 

imagoon

Diamond Member
Feb 19, 2003
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When you install ESXi... you really want to install the Hypervisor to a small partition and partition and format the rest of the space yourself. Nothing makes your day more than to go and extend a vdisk and get a message that 512GB -(512k) is the max file size because the installer picked 1MB segment sizes.
 

GhettoFob

Diamond Member
Apr 27, 2001
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It will not be the limit in ESX5. The limit will be something like 54TB. Odd number but it is what it is supposed to be.

My bad, I think you're right, it should be higher. Haven't heard the 54TB # yet though.