How to use 2TB and up hard drives, with ESXI 5.5?

You can

1. Create a RAID array, of many disks to create a large datastore.

2. Create a single datastore on a single disk, and then add another disk to it, to expand the datastore.

(this is dangerous, because if a disk fails, the entire datastore will fail)

I know this is an advanced an only related side question (so I will of course award you for your original question), but do you know why VMware has not fixed this yet?  Like is it some limitation of their cluster based file system VMFS 5, or is it a limitation of the ESXI 5.5 hypervisor.  Where I am going with this is, could I theoretically point ESXI 5.5 at a NFS (also cluster file system?) data store instead of VMFS, and would this allow it to use these drives?

Thanks

what limitation ? fixed what?

the maximum size of a vmfs datastore is 64TB, and has been since ESXi 5.0. Before that in 4.x, it was limited to 2TB-512bytes.

You can always use a NFS export on Windows, Unix or Linux to present to ESXi, and use the native file system for virtual machines, e.g. as a datastore (non-VMFS).

What I mean by limit is the 512 byte limit disk sector size for VMware vSphere and VSAN.  For example, what we are trying to do (with our budget), is squeeze the most value out of an upcoming server purchase.  We were going to opt for an 8 HD bay Dell server (for room to grow), loaded with 4 times (>2TB 2.5 SAS drives) and RAID 5 them.  All being managed by a PERC 730, but are worried that we will have to purchase 1TB drives instead because VMware does not yet support 4k bytes sector size.

...But it looks like you address this in your original point 1.  But yeah, I was just wondering.  So I guess the limitation is on ESXI recognizing physical hard disk sector sizes as apposed to logical data store "spanning" size (lack of a better term).  So not a VMFS limit, must be ESXI HAL issue...I dunno.

I hope this makes sense, I may be getting confused.

Ok, thank you sir.  As always, I appreciate the help.