Increase Datastore Size on ESXi 4.0 Update 1

[JRWilliams]

Hello,

I have recently started testing ESXi in a lab to prepare a business case for a production rollout. When I started out, I was only able to procure hardware that had two 146GB SAS drives in a RAID1 and ended up letting VMWare use the full space as its datastore. I was able to get another drive and mirgrated my RAID1 to a RAID5. I now have approximately 271GB available and would like to have my ESXi server utilize this extra storage.

I read up on the new features that enable me to grow my filesystem and have tried on several occasions to increase my datastore with no luck. Using the Increase Datastore wizard I am unable to expand my stoarge across the full array. vSphere does see the increase in space, the wizard just will not let me continue. My setup consists of just 1 ESXi server with a local RAID5 array. I am using vSphere to connect to the host directly via its IP. I have attached three screenshots of what I am seeing to better explain my problem.

Has anyone experienced issues like mine?

Also, for some reason all my chassis fans (8 total) are running at full speed. I have checked the Health status and everything is showing as normal with the tempatures ranging from 28C to 40C but my fans are spinning at close to 8,000 RPMs each. Is there a way to throttle these down?

[lnairn]

Hi,

had you expanded the LUN in the Raid Manager, after you migrated to Raid5?

[JRWilliams]

The RAID Controller shows the array as a healthy RAID5 logical volume of 271GB and the datastore properties in vSphere show the additional space as well.

[mittim12]

Maybe this thread can help you out. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/220476?start=0&tstart=0

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[JRWilliams]

I have read through the link provided and will try to give as much info as I can. The output of my fdisk -l is

Disk /dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9b: 291.9 GB, 291999055872 bytes

64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 278472 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9bp1 5 900 917504 5 Extended

/dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9bp2 901 4995 4193280 6 FAT16

/dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9bp3 4996 139236 137462784 fb VMFS

/dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9bp4 * 1 4 4080 4 FAT16 <32M

/dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9bp5 5 254 255984 6 FAT16

/dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9bp6 255 504 255984 6 FAT16

/dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9bp7 505 614 112624 fc VMKcore

/dev/disks/naa.600605b000f5d5a012e1d9221807af9bp8 615 900 292848 6 FAT16

Partition table entries are not in disk order

I have all my VM's (currently 3) off and they are all on one host. I am connecting to that host via the vSphere 4 client. My datastore is local and is VMFS 3.33 with a 1MB block size. I only have 1 LUN (LUN 0) and it shows as 291.9 GB.

[AndreTheGiant]

You have no free partion for a new primary one.

And the extended partition (after the VMFS partition) cannot be extend or moved.

So I do not see how you can increase the VMFS with your disk layout.

Andre

[JRWilliams]

What would you recommend?

I have my datastore backup up via Veeam FastSCP so would the quickest way be to delete my current datastore, create a new one with the full 270GB and then just copy my VM's back to the new datastore?

[AndreTheGiant]

I suggest to make a backup of your VM, make a backup of your ESXi and do complete and clean resintallation.

Just to have the right partition table.

Andre

[JRWilliams]

Ok. I will try that and post my results back.

Thank you for your help so far.