ESXi 4.1 P700M + MDS600 + 2TB drives

[RandomChar]

Basic hardware: BL460C G6 P700M controller attached to a MDS600 with 35 2TB drives.

I am looking for the best practice in using the above configuration with redundancy built in.

I found this old posting: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ESX/VMware-error-with-p700m-connected-to-MDS600/m-p/4524480/highlight/true#M92

Which indicated I needed to make my LUN/drive size less than 2TB in size.  If I do this via the P700m bios setup, I would end up with 35 2TB drives presented to the VMWare host, and I could stretch my datastores across all of the drives, but that configuration does not afford me any redundancy on the physical drive side.

My question is: "How do I get RAID 5, with a hot spare using a P700m controller and 2TB drives, that will present storage to a ESXi 4.1 host knowing that the datastore limit is 2TB ?"

[RandomChar · Accepted solution]

I almost feel silly for posting the question now that I have the answer, but hopefully this will help somone else down the road.

If you are like me, and do not have anything else loaded on your VMWare host like any HP managment software, or you are not a command line guru this solution is for you.

Solution: Boot the latest SmartStart CD and use the MAINTENANCE function to enter into the array configuration utility.

Once in the array configuration utility select the P700M controller, then select the disk you would like to use to create an array.  Once your array is configured to your liking, you can then create a drive.  The critical part is to select OTHER under the size parameter and then create a 1950GB drive.  Repeat the process until all the space is used.

Once finished, exit out the SmartStart CD, boot the node as normal, and then you can add the disk as you normally would. 

I only picked 1950GB because it was a nice round number and I didnt want to do the math for the exact calculation for 2TB - 512KB in HP numbers.