Big vmdk's?

[peter1965]

Hello All -

We have an application called enovia that requires approximatley 2TB of a virtual disk (will 2TB - 512k) for esxi4.1. This machine is virtual but we use NFS datastores. Typically I make my datastores about 2.5TB and have many machines in them versus one big machine in there. Also the backups (we use commvault) I think will suffer if I backup the whole machine.

Is it a good idea to have a 2TB vmdk for engeneering drawing files? We also plan on going to esxi5 soon which breaks that 2TB limit. We dont use FC so no RDMs are available to be used. Besides I am not a big fan of using them.

The primary filer is a 6280 all 15k SAS disk.

Thoughts?

What would you do?

Looking for thought provoking ideas..:)

[jeredarassier]

While I have not run this particular application I have had no significant trouble running all the way up to the 2T-512k mark with VMDK's in regards to performance either on the primary or during backup (any more than 2 TB regardless of how it is provisioned would cause) on NFS and have not seen any other cautionary note about doing so.

I will make mention that vSphere5 gets rid of the 2TB VMFS and physical RDM limit but VMDK's are still limited to 2TB (-512k) unfortunately