ESXi + 3TB + WHS2011

welding11 · 25 Jan 2013 at 12:42

Good afternoon,

I am having trouble with getting 2 X 3TB Seagate HDD to appear properly in WHS2011.

So you know where I am at I have added the 2 drives into my server and have added them as RDMs through SSH on ESXi (as these drives are going to be jsut for media I want to be able to take them out and use them in another computer if needs be).

They are showing in my DataStore and I can add them to my Virtual CentOS machine and the details on the drive show the full 3TB.

When I add the same disks to my WHS2011 system it recognizes the HDDs in device manager and in Computer Management. The issue is that it is displaying one of the HDD as 0mb , the other as -128mb and it will not let me format them at all. All the options are greyed out.

I try to sort everything myself so I can learn from the experience but this one has baffled me and I cant find any answers after searching for the last two nights.

If anybody can offer any suggestions as I fear I may have to tackle the whole thing another way such as not using ESXi. MY experiences with servers are limited so I will answer any questions as best as I can.

If it helps my server is just my old computer (can't remember all the parts) :
Q6600
Asus p5q-e
Hard drives plugged straight into motherboard.

Uhtred · 25 Jan 2013 at 12:56

I had a quick google and it looks like it's not related to esxi - whs2011 has 2tb limitation.

I think there are workarounds though so i'm sure there is a solution out there

welding11 · 25 Jan 2013 at 13:04

This is where I keep seeing mixed message. Only adding a HDD through the Dashboard has the limits because of the file format WHS 2011 uses apparently.

Well thanks anyway. I will do some more research tonight see if I can find a definitive answer.

Uhtred · 25 Jan 2013 at 13:14

I think you can provision the drive as GPT instead of MBR from disk management or you could split the drive into two partitions.

http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=10607

welding11 · 25 Jan 2013 at 20:16

Thanks for that. It is one of the many threads I have read.

I know the issue with windows is that it is not showing the full storage capacity.

The problem I am getting is that I can only see the disk in disk management and it is showing 0mb in size. If I right click on that disk I cannot convert it to anything make a dynamic volume.

I have just pulled the disk out to see if windows 7 at least picks up the size and it does fine. I am still unsure where to focus my efforts, esxi or whs 2011.

Appreciate the reply though. Thanks

Uhtred · 25 Jan 2013 at 20:34

Ok let's go back to esxi, are you running 5.1?

Edit check the solution at the bottom of this thread http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1731949

welding11 · 25 Jan 2013 at 21:02

5.0 at the minute. Before we go any further let me upgrade now as there is no reason not to and if it fixes my issues, happy days.

welding11 · 31 Jan 2013 at 12:37

Just an update on where I got with this as I only managed to get around looking again yesterday. I could not for the life of me get it to work.

In the end I installed ESXi 5.1 and added the hard drives through the VSphere client directly as RDM just wouldn't work.

I then added 2 virtual drives, 1 x 2tb and then the other with the amount of space left.

Its not exactly what I wanted as I will not be able to just remove them and use them elsewhere but would I really need to do that, probably not.

Also I had looked at the thread you posted and it is one I had already looked at and tried to no avail.

Thanks again though.