esxi datastore question

[Putz]

I know 2tb is the max but heres the question, I have Four (4) 2tb Hitchi drives coming for an lsi controller I have id want to setup with Raid 10 which is going to end up with 4tb of space

will ESXi just make Two(2) 2tb datastores?


or should I make the raid 10 and use something like the acronis boot cd and make the partitions manually? I dont believe you can partition within the raid bios

 

[Mindflux]

You'll need to either a) make two separate 2TB LUNs or B) carve up that 4TB lun into partitions via gparted or something before trying to use them in ESXi.

 

[defuseme2k]

egads :\

You're going to have to split the raid up into multiple LUNs. I am going to assume the LSI controller's setup utility will allow you to do this, although I don't 'think' I've ever used it... at least not LSI branded. A single LUN can only be 2TB - 512bytes. I'm going to assume the 4TB isn't exact, it is probably less with overhead, so what you would see without splitting is a 1.something TB volume out of your "close" to 4 TB... which would suck. I would setup ESXi on a thumb drive to make the raid setup a step less complicated.

 

[Putz]

well esxi is loaded on a spare ssd i have, the raid controller and 2tb drives will just be for vm storage datastores

was thinking i should be able to make the raid 10 and make a pair of partitions on with Acronis then let esxi have them and make them vmfs3 format i believe it would be

 

[Tau]

You are correct, you will need to carve LUNs out of that 4TB pool. Remember to make them 2TB minus 512Bytes (or smaller), Then just present the LUNs to ESXi.

 

[ItsTooHot]

You are correct, you will need to carve LUNs out of that 4TB pool. Remember to make them 2TB minus 512Bytes (or smaller), Then just present the LUNs to ESXi.

I created 3 2TB RAID6 arrays on my Highpoint 4310 controller. ESXi was able to see all three arrays as 1.82TB each.
I created a datastore on each.