Error adding 4tb LUN (Raw Device Mapping) to ESX4 VM

Posted by Tom Gardiner on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Tom Gardiner
Published on 2010-03-19T00:40:33Z Indexed on 2010/03/19 0:41 UTC
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esx

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san

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vmdk

Hi guys,

I'm trying to map an existing 4tb LUN from a Fibre Channel SAN, through to a VM in my ESX4 environment. It keeps telling me that the VMDK file size exceeds the the maximum size supported by the datastore.

I've tried in Physical compatibility mode, and also both Virtual styles.

I'm a little confused by this as we had the same LUN mapped through to another VM when we were running ESX3.5... I've also noticed that some of my other RAW mappings are generating extremely large VMDK files on the ESX servers. Does anyone know if this change in behaviour is intentional? And if so why? It doesn't seem to me that if the LUN is mapped directly to the VM that it's size should be relevant.

We're running 4.0.0 build 236512, and 4.0.0 build 219382 and I've not had any success on either.

Any insight or advice would be much appreciated!

TG

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