presenting MD1200 volume to vmware VM

Question

i have connected a md1200 to my esxi 5 host server.

one large raid 5 array 11TB total disk.

I would like 500GB for my VM

But I would then like 2 x 5TB volumes presented to the VM.

How would i accomplish this?

thanks.

dirkdigs · Answer

Is it possible to Configure more than one LUN?

Dev Mgr · Answer

With an MD1200 you cannot give a VM a single disk larger than 2TB with vSphere5.

Rumor is that vSphere6 will increase the maximum (vmdk) filesize, but that is speculation till vSphere6 is actually out.

Your only choice is to give the VM 5 x 2TB disks. You could then use dynamic disk to span them together.

However, here are a few recommendations:

- don't use raid 5 with more than 6 or 7 drives; instead move to raid 6 if reliability is important or raid 10 if performance is important

- don't use dynamic disk on top of hardware raid

dirkdigs · Answer

I have 7 disks and configured a RAID 5.

Presented One large 10+ TB LUN to vSphere (Datastore)

Created a bunch of 2TB hard drives (vmdk files)

Used dik anager in windows to span them all together to achive my 2 x 5 TB NTFS volumes.

Dev Mgr · Answer

If you have a solid backup plan or don't care too much about losing the data, that is an option.

PowerVault