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Hmm...&quot;best&quot; way is determined by your needs really :)<br />
<br />
Concur with @hanccocka ir: RDM. And, it's not really for performance reasons. VMDK vs RDM is so negligible anymore, performance is not a factor. But, RDM is the easiest....with 5.1 at least. You can use 1 disk for your VM instead of multiple VMDKs as an OS-based &quot;spanned drive&quot;. You can use PHYSICAL RDM up to 64TB.<br />
<br />
Regards,<br />
~coolsport00
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VM Guru’s,<br />
<br />
One of my VM guests will need a hard drive around 5 TB in size. &nbsp;The HD will host large imaging files. &nbsp;What is the best (recommended) way to accomplish this task? and Why? &nbsp;:)<br />
<br />
1) iSCSI through the guest VM to the LUN<br />
2) RDM<br />
3) Or is there another way?<br />
<br />
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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VM Guru’s,

One of my VM guests will need a hard drive around 5 TB in size.  The HD will host large imaging files.  What is the best (recommended) way to accomplish this task? and Why?  :)

1) iSCSI through the guest VM to the LUN
2) RDM
3) Or is there another way?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hmm...&quot;best&quot; way is determined by your needs really :)

Concur with @hanccocka ir: RDM. And, it&#39;s not really for performance reasons. VMDK vs RDM is so negligible anymore, performance is not a factor. But, RDM is the easiest....with 5.1 at least. You can use 1 disk for your VM instead of multiple VMDKs as an OS-based &quot;spanned drive&quot;. You can use PHYSICAL RDM up to 64TB.

Regards,
~coolsport00

VMware 5.1 Disk Size

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.