Hi,

we just purchased a MD3000i with 15 x 300 GB SAS 15k HDDs and a MD1000 with 6 x 1 TB SATA HDDs as a central storage device for two redundant VMWare ESX servers (PE2950).
When trying to create a LUN larger than 2 TB (we are planning to use the 15 x 300 GB disks in RAID5 + hot spare = 4.2 TB) we were not successful.
When sizing the disk array we have been told by the Dell pre-sales consultant that a capacity of 4.2 TB would be feasable and now there seem to be some limitations...
Is there anybody who could tell us if there's really a size limitation and if yes, is there probably a workaround?

Yes, there is a 2TB limit. Yes, many customers have requested larger. Yes, it is in the works with a firmware upgrade. No, I can not give you an exact date, but keep an eye out for it end of year or into first part of next.

The firmware update will allow you to make LUNs as large as the arrays that you create.

Hi Scott,
thanks a lot for the quick clarification. Once the fw upgrade will be available, we'll face a choice between creating a 4.2 TB LUN or splitting the capacity into e.g. two equal parts.
Since no VM will be larger than 2 TB, could you recommend the one or the other option (pro's & con's)?

Not many pro and con issues, others might want to chime in here .... I think the bigger decisions you have to make are deciding how many drives to have in the array, which determines how many IOs and more performance are available to the LUN. This is more of a factor when you are sharing the MD3000i between boxes and applications and have to decide how to carve it up.

If it's just for VM's and all hosts that are connected will be for VM's, then I say to just use all the disks and make one big LUN.

However, there may be other considerations. How long will it take to backup the LUN, maybe you want a second lun so that you can move VMs to it and performance maintenance tasks to the other LUN. If you have one big LUN, you can't do that.

If anyone else has other thoughts of experiences, please feel free to share.