Does anyone know if you can use 2TB+ vmware disks on ESXi?

[Rainforest]

Hi all, I am trying to add a 2TB+ drive to a RHEL 6.3 server on a ESXi 5.1 server.

The server has 4x12TB volumes directly attached which I have all ready added to the Datastore and formatted with VMFS-5 which it said was needed to user 2TB+ disk sizes.

However when I go to add an additional hard drive to my Linux VM it only allows me to choose 2TB max! Grrr....

Not sure if there are some prerequisites that I am missing but I have been searching and nothing obvious stands out to me as yet.

Wondering if anyone has an idea on this one?

Cheers,
Sam

 

[Rainforest]

Thanks for your replies guys. I am currently running some IO Load test tools to compare performance using the method you both described above vs Raw Device Mapping (RDM) where I have been able to add a single 12TB disk but I know this is not a supported method.

Any feedback or opinions on using RDM's?

Ideally I wanted to stay away from having to use a logical volume manager if I could but it seems like I won't be able to do that if I want to remain in a supported set-up.

 

[Rainforest]

Thanks for that DiscoDave. The application which I will be running on the server is a backup application which runs best with as few as possible mount points for the data.

Also on my preliminary tests the write through put has been faster when using a RDM drive when compared with the LVM and grouping 6 x 2TB drives per mount point.

Still keeping an open mind. I am not too concerned about if I will be running an unsupported configuration as this will be a replica of the production backup server anyway.