esxi 4.1 - new install - one datastore - 2.18TB

It might be easier to install ESXi on a USB flash drive if supported on your server, leaving your RAID array free, so you can just create a VMFS datastore.

Don't create any partitions, just let ESX installation create the partitions it needs, just supply a blank unformatted disk (just create the array) for ESX.

Yes, you should have created more than 1 logical drive in your RAID5 array.  You will have to redo your install.

If it were me, I would create 3 logical drives of about 740GB each, and make sure I would not allocate more than 512GB in virtual machines for each datastore.  This will ensure that you will have enough space remaining in each datastore for VM snapshots for such things as VMware-supported backup products like those sold by Veeam, Quest, etc. (These products make heavy use of snapshots.  So, if you are going to use them, you need to make sure that you plan your storage allocation accordingly.

Create as manu logical drives as your require, we usually recommend logical drives or LUNs, between 500 and 800GB. These will each appear as a datastore in ESX.

also member then your format the datastores in ESX, the following table, format with the relevant block size to support your virtual disk sizes, this cannot be changed after the datastore is formatted.

• 1MB block size – 256GB maximum file size
• 2MB block size – 512GB maximum file size
• 4MB block size – 1024GB maximum file size
• 8MB block size – 2048GB maximum file size

This is all about block size there are limits about block size and Max 2TB partitions. The Configuration Maximums document  specifies each.  Please check here:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_config_max.pdf

Page 3 has all the information you'll need.


Cheers,
K.

I found the hidden console in ESXi but it still won't recognize the flash drive.