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VMWare Hard Drive Volume Capacity is 2.72TB but Available Only Shows 742.23GB on Newly Created RAID5 Volume . . . why?

I just added an IBM external storage array and an additional RAID controller for it to my VMWare ESX 3.5 server. I configured five 750GB drives into a RAID5 with the controller and VMWare sees both the new controller and the 2.72TB volume. However . . . When I use the Add Storage Wizard from VMWare Infrastructure Client the "Device Location" screen shows that the volume has a capacity of 2.72 TB with 742.23 GB available.

Can anyone tell me why and how to fix it? I am setting up a file server and really want the entire 2.72 TB available. I know the max file size is 2TB for VMFS and that should be no problem - actually preferred.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can tell me what I am doing wrong. The RAID controller is an IBM (LSI Logic) MegaRAID 8480 controller.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

larstr

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larstr

To use all of this disk space you could maybe split up your array in 2 LUNs. Below is a screen shot of how it's could be done in Storage Manager.

Lars

storage-manager-2.7tb.jpg

Randy_Bojangles

Exactly as Lars says above

Scratched my head for ages first time I saw this until I had VM tech support remote onto the system and confirm it was a SCSI limitation.

Sorry !

dmcoop

ASKER

Thank you Lars. What I decided to do is to order another 750GB drive and setup two RAID-5s that are 1.5TB each. I understood that VMFS could not see bigger than 2TB but I was thinking like a Windows guy and figured I'd format one part to be 2TB and then the rest would be a seperate partition. I didn't realize that the VMware server itself would not see larger than 2TB.