LeftHand VSA - Presenting 10TB to OS in 2TB Blocks

[Numinus]

What is the best practice to present 10TB to the VSA when the limitation of LUN size is 2TB in vSphere 4.0? I'm using an Adaptec card with no auto-carving.

Do I add the first 2TB and then the rest as extents? I'm having issues do that right now and am receiving errors while attempting to add extents.

Any help is appreciated.

[Mark...]

Hi,
Maybe you have the wrong version of VSA file?
Get the latest from here:
https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductsList.do?category=SWSDED
It's one of the files!
Then you add in 5 disks at 2TB each to make up the 10TB VSA.
Mark...

[Niels Vejrup Pedersen]

Hello,

You cannot overcome the 2TB limit.

You need to create multiple datastores and then add multiple 2TB disks to the VSA.

Regards

[Steven Clementi]

You can add up to 5 virtual hard drives to the VSA.

They should be at addresses 1:0, 1:1, 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4.

Create 5 2TB Virtual Disks and present them.


Steven

[Numinus]

Thanks for the reply. As far as I can tell, without being able to break the 10TB volume up into 2TB partitions there is no way to add the datastores to VMware. You can add one, but then get errors when trying to create another datastore on the volume. FDISK has a 2TB limit as well. Parted can do GPT, but VMware doesn't respond to a partition table that is not 'msdos'. I am attempting to use the Adaptec Storage Manager to carve up the logical drives into smaller partitions right now. Will report back on that.

[Steven Clementi]

What physical storage are you using?

[Numinus]

The physical storage is a 16 port RAID with 1TB drives. 2 in a RAID1 for the OS, and the rest in a RAID5.

I've found the answer to my question. My RAID controller is an Adaptec 31605. Unlike 3Ware cards, that have 'auto carving' built into the card, you have to use the Adaptec Storage Manager (ASM) software to create the volumes. That software is not built into the card and there is no way to partition the volumes properly without it. I have successfully carved out 5 2TB volumes that VMware sees. Thank you so much to everyone for the help.