Hi guys,

I'm currently running a whitebox ESXi 4 system using RDM (Thanks to Dave's help!), with an IBM M5014 controller and 3 x 1TB Drives in RAID5. Therefore it shows up as 2TB, under the limit I had read about.

I would like to increase this storage by adding a couple more 1TB drives to the RAID 5 array and then make this available to my file server, ideally as one large drive of 4TB.

I would prefer to do this with ESXi 4 if possible, unless the improvements in v5 far outweigh v4, or it can't be done in v4.

Any help, or guidance would be great.

TIA

I believe you are out of luck in ESXi 4, as it only supports LUNs up to 2TB. This is solved in 5, along with some other improvements.

http://cknic.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/w ... n-esx-4-1/

With an RDM you're limited as posted to 2 TB. If your system supports VMdirectpath you could try passed the RAID controller directly to the VM in which case the vSphere storage limits would be bypassed.

Hi ehidle, if I have to go to V5, then as long as my hardware is still supported, then O woudl definitely consider that.

Hi Dave, I've been Googling, but I haven't been able to find out whether my Asus P5QL PRO mobo supports VMdirectpath. It was quite a while ago, but I do recall my mobo did lack a couple of the VM features I would've liked. If it helps to identify whether it supports it or not, I am using a physical RDM by using the vmkfstools -z switch, but I have a feeling these are different things?

It's a different thing. In the BIOS you'd see a setting for VT-d (or Intel Directed I/O) - and it's a seperate setting from VT-x (Intel Virtualization Technology).

And just be aware that a whitebox board, though it may support VT-d, may not be everything it's cracked up to be. I have an ASUS board that supports it, but 90% of the hardware I've tried to use with Passthrough has not worked, particularly any kind of SATA controller whatsoever, supported or not.

I've managed to passthrough with USB controllers (there's a whole other caveat with that, though), ATI (nVidia is a no-go) video cards, and ethernet cards, and that's about it.