VMWare ESXI 5 - Datastores

[IKWeb]

Hi All

 

Not sure the answer on this one so I hope one of you guys may know the answer...

 

Can a virtual machines HDD span multiple datastores in VMWare EXSI 5?

 

For example, I have a datastore that is 8TB which is becoming full. I have just installed another 4 2TB HDD which are attached to the same raid card. Created a new datastore, but I need to be able to expand a VMs drive into this new datastore..

 

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks

[twin--turbo]

Fairly sure it can't

 

The OS may be able to use to drives ( one on each data store ) as a single entity, but that would be the OS.

 

Rob

[Ric_]

You can't span datastores, but you could just migrate the machine to the new storage.

[Theblacksheep]

create the new lun and datastore, then 'add extent' to the old one referencing the new one. Your data store will be bigger.

 

VMware KB: Creating and managing extents on ESX/ESXi

 

8TB is a huge datastore, so if you have multiple VMs on that its recommended max 15-20 vms per datastore. If so might be worth a rethink of your storage config.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Theblacksheep

[IKWeb]

Thanks for the feedback guys

[glennda]

a couple of things. Depending on how your ESXI is installed you may not acutually be able to expand the single datastore (if ESXI is installed to the same partition as the datastore then 99.9% of the time you can't expand) this is down to the way the disk paritions are laid out when ESXI is installed.

 

As mentioned above you can't span a vmdk across multiple datastores. You can have multiple VM disks in the same vm on different datastores.

 

This means that effectively you could run 2 disks in the VM on different datastores and then use the "Spanned disk" feature inside windows to make them appear as one disk.

 

Create a Spanned Volume

[gshaw]

That's a biiig datastore, is that 8TB for a file server VM?