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While I'm waiting for VMWare support to get back to me, I thought I'd ask here. I have a 400 gig LUN presented from a fiber channel SAN to my VMWare host. It's legacy from another virtualization platform and I need to keep it as is to avoid a long period of downtime. I formatted my VMFS3 datastore with 4 meg blocks to allow up to 1 TB disks. Then I tried adding my 400 gig disk as a raw device in physical compatibility mode. I get the error:

"File is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore 'Base Test'. [Base Test]VMTEST01/VMTEST01_2.vmdk

Originally I had the VMFS datastore formatted with 1 meg blocks which was the cause of this problem since the largest disk allowed would be 256 gigs. But I deleted the data store and then reformatted with 4 megs blocks. I've also tried using virtual compatibility mode for the raw device but it still fails. Does anyone have any suggestions? I've been waiting for a little over a week for VMWare, but that's fine because I'm not yet a paying customer. I'm still in the eval phase.

George H. Lenzer
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  • Does it show up as 4Mb blocks under storage configuration in VI Client, or still showing as 1Mb? I had a similar problem aftr reformatting an OpenFiler LUN and it was corrected by rescanning after re-adding. For whatever reason, VMWare hadn't picked up the change of block size. – Chris Thorpe Feb 23 '10 at 22:46
  • Chris, thanks for answering. Yes, it shows up as having 4 meg blocks and the maximum file size is 1024 G. I'm tempted to just try one more time to delete everything and reformat the data store from scratch like I did before. – George H. Lenzer Mar 01 '10 at 17:32

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I'm still testing, but I think the answer is that after I deleted the only data store on the system, I didn't reboot before creating a new one. So it's possible that the partition table didn't get an update. That's a WILD guess. But it's based on my deleting the data store again this morning and then rebooting before creating a new one.

George H. Lenzer
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