Equipment:
– EVA 4400 storage system
– ESXi 4.1 hosts managed via Virtual Centre
– Windows Server 2K3 R2 64bit Enterprise Edition VMs
Goal:
– Have a very large volume that is used for on-disk backups before they are written to tape
Current Solution:
– We have four 2TB Vdisks (EVA term) presented to the ESXi hosts as four different 2TB VMFS datastores each of which holds a single 2TB VMDK. Those four VMDKs are presented to the Windows VM which uses spanning to create a single 8TB volume.
Basically I would like to know if there is a better way of presenting this storage to the VM. I experimented with using extents to make a larger VMFS volume but due to the 2TB limit on VMDKs it still requires using spanning within Windows.
iSCSI is not an option at this stage so I'm just wondering if there's a better way to achieve this goal or is this the best I can do given what I have to work with?
Best Answer
You're doing the best thing you can given your situation. Obviously iSCSI would be ideal here, and the next best thing is using RDM. Unfortunately, VMware limits RDM sizes to just under 2 TB (2 TB - 512 B). So even using RDM, you're going to end up spanning 4 LUNs to get the disk you need.