I have a HP P800 array controller connected to a HP MSA60 with 12x 1TB SATA drives installed. I provisioned a single array with 1 spare in ACU. I have followed this KB and created 4x 1.9TB logical drives and a 1.5 TB logical drive.
I created a new VMFS-5 datastore from the first logical drive of size 1.9TB (named: vmh03-das02)
My issue is that when i try to extend the datastore to the other logical drives, as the KB suggests, there are no devices listed.
Does anyone have any idea why this would be?
screen shots can be seen here
Best Answer
Using extents in VMware isn't so great. The knowledgebase article you linked to is correct in that this is a driver limitation...
Your HP Smart Array P800 controller supports logical drives sizes larger than 2TB. The "limit" is 8 Zettabytes :)
You should update the controller firmware if you haven't already.
However, VMware uses two drivers for HP RAID controllers; the CCISS and HPSA. The HPSA supports the larger volumes, but not your controller (without hacking). The P400/P800 are basically stuck with the older CCISS driver.
So yes, you need to use extents here. I'm curious if you've rebooted and rescanned the storage devices since having this problem. You should be able to do this hot and without a reboot, but the rescan of LUNs may be necessary. Use the "Rescan All..." option.
If this doesn't work, your best bet is to obtain a Smart Array P810 controller, since it uses the newer driver and will see the full logical drive size.