I have 4 TB of Physical space but can only seem to make a VMFS of 90 GB?
Best Answer
VMFS 3, being LVM-based, cannot properly deal with partitions of >2TB. Carve up your array into <2TB blocks (i.e. 2 x 2TB in this case), present them to your host and either create two VMFS datastores or one with two extents - I'd create two by the way.
I just did this today (4.0, not 3.5). I had an existing disk with a single VMFS3 partition filling the whole disk. That partition was a datastore all by itself. After installing ESXi 4.0, I plugged the disk back in and rebooted. On boot, the new (well old) datastore was under /vmfs3/volumes/ automatically.
I had this same issue, but only for our replicated LUNs in the cluster. We were migrating from 4.0u1 to 4.1u1. The solution was simply to log into each host and run the command:
# esxcfg-volume -l to view the datastores
# esxcfg-volume -m "vmfs_label_name"
Then go back to the VI client and refresh Storage - the datastore should be in the inventory.
I'm similarly not entirely comfortable with the solution, kinda weird, but thought I'd share.
Best Answer
VMFS 3, being LVM-based, cannot properly deal with partitions of >2TB. Carve up your array into <2TB blocks (i.e. 2 x 2TB in this case), present them to your host and either create two VMFS datastores or one with two extents - I'd create two by the way.