HP ESXi V4U1 fails to install on large disc array

[Colin Butcher]

DL380G6 with 8x 500GB SAS drives as RAID50 gives about 2.8TB of storage. Attempting to install ESXi fails. The target disc as shown by the ESXi installer has 0.0GB storage.

It installs fine on the same DL380G6 with 8x 146GB SAS discs as a RAID50 array.

I assume that there's a bug in the installer which cannot handle large target discs.

This is a lab machine for testing and qualification, so I'd like to have as much spare disc space as posible for the VM image datastore, so a single RAID50 array is the preferred solution.

Is there an ESXi installer that will cope with a large target device?

Cheers, Colin (www.xdelta.co.uk).

[Colin Butcher]

With the array configured as RAID10 it gives about 1.8TB or storage.

The ESXi 4 update 1 installer works fine. It seems as if 2TB is the cutoff between the installer calculating the target device size correctly, or when over 2TB it calculates the size as zero.

Cheers, Colin (www.xdelta.co.uk).

[Uwe Zessin]

The ESX/ESXi drivers are limited to disks <= 2TB-512B.
And another limit is the MBR-style partition table, which uses 32-bit pointers/counters.

(2*32)*512B = 2TB

It is documented in the "Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere 4.0"
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_config_max.pdf

Page 4, "Extents size"

[Colin Butcher]

Yes, it's the old 32bit limit. Thanks for the document pointer.

Cheers, Colin.