What is the largest VMware ESXi 5 guest vm disk size (and how to set it up)?

Question

Is it possible to set up a guest virtual machine with larger than a 2TB drive? For example, from what I read, the largest VMFS size is 2TB. If I have 3 TB VMFS set up on the host ESXi server, how can I create a 4 or 6 TB drive for the virtual machine (is that possible)?

Solution

This could be done using LVM : you can create multiple 2 TB vmdk's, then add them to a volume group : your guest OS will see them as a single disk. Here is a good starting point to learn more about LVM : http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

Comments

[Scott Szretter]

Yes, I saw this page. Though I am not sure it's clear to me if 5 allows larger guest vm drives or not. When I add a hard drive to the guest vm, it is only allowing me to create a maximum 2tb drive, so I am guessing the answer is that 2tb is the limit, but I just want to make sure I am not missing something. So that means in the guest vm I have to take the multiple drives and combine them using software raid or something similar??

[joeqwerty]

I see, at the bottom of the article it states that the maximum VMDK size is still 2TB. So the difference is between the hardware layer (Extent) and the file system layer (VMDK). You could have a single Extent (physical layer) larger than 2TB but you'd have to add multiple VMDK's (file system layer) to the VM and use the OS to create a volume larger than 2TB.