topic How should I serve this up? in VMware Solutions Discussions

How should I serve this up?

peter1965 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:44:29 GMT

Greets -

I have a scenario where by they want to have a Win2k3 virtual server to have access to about a 2tb RDM lun. I am not a fan of RDM. Other choices would be vdmk drive or maybe cifs.

Environment is clustered esxi 4.1 hosts connected with fiber and 10Gbe for NFS and fas6280

I want it to be a flexible solution where by I dont want him to negat eany performance or expandability later on.

thoughts ideas and recommendations?

How should I serve this up?

arunchak — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:12:37 GMT

HI,

Guess you are aware of 2TB datastore limit for iSCSI in VMware: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003565.

One option is you can have extents and increase the datastore size (not sure about the performance in this case)

or the other option is to create a NFS datastore of more than 2TB size and have your 2TB vmdk drive on that.

Thanks,

Arun

How should I serve this up?

peter1965 — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:51:31 GMT

Yes sir.. I am aware.. thanks..

Also what about having a large vmdk like that.. ? Is that efficient? To me i think having that large vmdk sounds the most convient and easiest to deploy but i was just wondering about the managbility of it.

thanks for your response!

Re: How should I serve this up?

arunchak — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:10:36 GMT

That question should be for VMware . However seems like VMware claims to have no issues with large vmdk’s as per the following link http://communities.vmware.com/message/1212587#1212587.

Hope this is useful.

Thanks,

Arun