ESXi 4.1 iSCSI won't create partition the full size of the Openfiler Volume

Question

I created an iSCSI volume in Openfiler.

Volume name Volume description Volume size File system type File system size FS used space FS free space Delete Properties Snapshots backup Backup Storage 3717536 MB iSCSI Not applicable Not applicable Not applicable In use Edit Create

When I create the partition in VMware, it sets the size of the partition to 1.55TB even though it detects that the iSCSI volume is 3.7TB. I get this error message in /var/log/messages. Any idea what's happening here??

Answer 1

ESXi 4.1 has a maximum extent size of 2 TB. Break it into separate volumes in OpenFiler and present separately to ESXi, and if desired, glue the extents back together into one datastore there.

Alternatively, upgrade to ESXi 5, where this limit is increased (I want to say I read 64TB somewhere).

edit: Yup, 64TB.

With VMFS5, you can create a 64TB datastore on a single extent.