Dell PowerStore Virtualization Infrastructure Guide

Using multiextent for VMFS datastores

VMware vSphere allows VMFS datastores to be expanded across multiple storage volumes (LUNs) by using the VMFS extents (multiextent) feature. Typically there is a one-to-one mapping between a VMFS datastore and a volume, but with multiextent, a single VMFS datastore may be partitioned across multiple storage volumes.

The distribution of the data by vSphere across these volumes may be unpredictable. As a best practice, you should build VMFS datastores that use multiextent on volumes that are in the same volume group. This produces crash-consistent snapshots and provides better data protection.