While I'm waiting for VMWare support to get back to me, I thought I'd ask here. I have a 400 gig LUN presented from a fiber channel SAN to my VMWare host. It's legacy from another virtualization platform and I need to keep it as is to avoid a long period of downtime. I formatted my VMFS3 datastore with 4 meg blocks to allow up to 1 TB disks. Then I tried adding my 400 gig disk as a raw device in physical compatibility mode. I get the error:
"File is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore 'Base Test'. [Base Test]VMTEST01/VMTEST01_2.vmdk
Originally I had the VMFS datastore formatted with 1 meg blocks which was the cause of this problem since the largest disk allowed would be 256 gigs. But I deleted the data store and then reformatted with 4 megs blocks. I've also tried using virtual compatibility mode for the raw device but it still fails. Does anyone have any suggestions? I've been waiting for a little over a week for VMWare, but that's fine because I'm not yet a paying customer. I'm still in the eval phase.
Best Answer
I'm still testing, but I think the answer is that after I deleted the only data store on the system, I didn't reboot before creating a new one. So it's possible that the partition table didn't get an update. That's a WILD guess. But it's based on my deleting the data store again this morning and then rebooting before creating a new one.