We are trying to figure out the best way to do a P2V on one of our main file servers (windows server 2003). Currently the server is physical with an MD1000 hard drive array attached through scsi, we have about 2.5TB of data, on the data volume of the server.
I know I can't make a vmfs volume greater than 2TB, I'm thinking of creating 3 1TB LUNS on our shared storage and then creating 3 vmfs volumes each with 1 disk to share to the virtual file server and then use a windows dynamic disk to span all 3 disk to get a 3TB volume in windows.
Is there a better way to do this? I've googled around for vmware dynamic disk best practices but haven't found anything I really liked.
Note:
This VM will be in a cluster of 3 vmware esxi 4.1 hosts with an equal logic SAN as the shared storage
Best Answer
Can you break up the file server data into 3 1TB chunks and present 3 separate disks to the VM and share those out separately? 3TB as one logical device is a lot to move, manage, backup, file check, etc.