Just a short article, as it is something that is still coming up. Today someone asked me why his ESXi 5.x host wasn’t showing this local 4TB volume. It took me a couple seconds before I realized what the issue was, but the problem they were hitting was the fact that the driver used for his HP Smart Controller even with ESXi 5.x was not recognizing larger than 2TB volumes. This is a driver issue, not an issue with vSphere and it is described in a nice KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006942.
Good article.
Short but meaningfull. It happens more and more that large volumes (more that 2 TB) are required.
“The work around for this issue is configure multiple logical volumes of the maximum size (2TB – 512 bytes) using the hardware raid-controller firmware.
After this you can dynamically add new extents to your VMFS datastore to increase the VMFS volumes capacity using smaller logical volumes, to a maximum of 64TB.”
Of course… I would suggest a design workaround; use NFS or iSCSI, avoiding use of additional drivers with limitations and bugs. Many vSphere features such as HA don’t work with local storage, and there is not much expandability or upgradeability; so if large scale workloads were required; local storage such as a SmartArray would generally be inappropriate.
My suggestion would be that local storage for ESXi systems be exclusively for system boot, logging scratch disk, and SSD swap cache. If attempting to do otherwise: anticipate running into plenty of unexpected capacity, reliability, expandability, and performance limitations with local storage.
Maybe some further clarification is required on this blog / KB article…
Is this specific to the driver version in the Vanilla ESXi 5.x ISO, or also includes HP custom build CD?
Reason I ask, is I actually just extended an 1.06TB volume to 2.4TB (with a single Logical Drive) and have no issues. The host is running the April 2013 HP ESXi build, and has HPSA version of 5.0.0-40OEM rather than the older version stated in the KB article Duncan referenced.
I have also created VMFS volumes larger than 2TB on a HPSA controller in the past without issue, however they’ve been at the 2.18TB mark.