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I need to create a 6TB RAID10 array for one of our applications. On our server, the Dell R515, we have (6) 2TB drives configured in RAID10.

I know that VMWare only suppors 2TB per LUN. I'm wondering if there's a way to directly pass the 6TB array from the H200 into the host OS? Is the H200 able to do this?

user9517
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ensnare
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  • I wasn't aware that an H200 was supported by VMWare ESXi? I'm fairly sure I tried to install ESXi 4 on an R310 with an H200 and the hypervisor install gave up and said no supported controller or some such error. – Lewis Mar 10 '11 at 16:39
  • Yeah it's on the compatibility list for 4.0 and 4.1. – ensnare Mar 10 '11 at 19:02

1 Answers1

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Not using .vmdk's or RDMs no. But you could carve it into 3 x 2GB and RAID0/LVM them inside the VM, messy but it works. The only way to get access to a LUN larger than 2TB directly is by adding another controller, connecting this array to it and using passthrough/VT-d to make the VM have full access to the controller and array - it's flakey and borderline experimental too. You could also move the array to another machine, share it as an iSCSI block LUN and mount that inside the VM.

Chopper3
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    VT-d wont be an option at all the R515 is an AMD platform, not sure if the R515 supports AMD-Vi, which is their IOMMU equivalent. I'd be very surprised if it worked with the H200 in any case. I'd go with your internal RAID0/LVM option personally. – Helvick Mar 10 '11 at 17:41
  • Great point Helvick, you know I'm more a HP person than Dell so good spot - it would be a crap solution anyway as you'd lose out on vMotion etc. We use FC-based RDMs for this sort of thing (clustering in our case) with OCFS2 and it's stable and reasonably fast. – Chopper3 Mar 10 '11 at 17:47