Virtual Machine max disk space.

[pizzoja]

Is there a max to the amout of disk space that a Virtual Machine can handle\see in?  I am building a win2k3 server the required roughy 5.25TB of disk space. 

[Ekoesling]

If I am not mistaken, the drive sizes supported is only limited to the operating system you are running and not the VMware environment itself. With that said, I can assure you, you do not want to create a 5.2TB VMDK file (or carve out that much space during the VM Creation process) if that is the direction you were thinking of going. Be sure to either setup a Raw Device Mapping or a seperate disk within your VM using iSCSI or Fiber. 10GB is the most effiecent VMDK size per VMware, however if you need to go larger, obviously you can, just keep it as low as possible.

[Viperman]

The largest size vmdk that you can create is 2TB.  When you set up the datastore you choose the size of the block size and maximum file size which is 2TB and 8MB block size.  It is recommended that anything over 50GB should probably be kept in an RDM.

Why do you need 5.25TB?

[pizzoja]

I am using the 5tb of disk space for massive amounts of raw audio files.   50gb is the smallest LUN that is presented to us by I will be using that for OS and Application.  If 2 TB is the limit the i guess i will need to an RDM for that disk.


Thanks, for the Help

[Viperman]

RDM's would definitely work.  In fact alot of people state that anything over 50Gigs should be an RDM, but I have not seen any factual data to support that.