VMware 6 unable to access entire Virtual Drive on MD1000

Question

I have a PowerEdge 2950 with an attached Powervault MD1000. The connection is made through a PERC 6/E. In the MD1000 I have installed seven (7) 2TB harddrives, with the last 1 installed recently. I have been adding harddrives to the enclosure periodically and performing the "Reconfiguration" each time to add them to the Virtual Disk in RAID-5.

I am using VMware 6.0 on the PowerEdge 2950 and accessing it through the vSphere Client (I do not have the vCenter Server). When I view the MD1000 through the Dell OMSA it shows a total capacity of the Virtual Disk at greater than 9TB but when I review the Virtual Disk through vSphere Client it shows a Partition of 3.94TB accessible (and the 9.09TB Capacity). I want to be able to access the entire available capacity through VMWare. Is there something I possibly missed during the installation of the hard drives into the enclosure or is there a limitation that I am not aware?

View of Virtual Disk from Dell OMSA

vSphere Client Datastore View of Virtual Disk

vSphere Client Device View of Virtual Disk

DELL-Sam L · Accepted Answer

Hello Speedaemon,

Sorry, I thought that you were changing the drives out for larger ones. Since you are just adding drives into empty slots you should be able to expand the virtual disk in the PERC utility or OMSA. Once the new space has been fully added to the virtual disk then you should just have to do a rescan in VMWare and it should see the space & allow it accessible. Since your PERC card is displaying the full size of your virtual disk I would say that there seems to be an issue with VMware.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

DELL-Sam L · Answer

Hello Speedaemon,

When you are adding bigger drives to replace smaller drives you will need to backup the data first, then destroy the virtual disk, and then create the virtual disk with the new size.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Speedaemon · Answer

DELL-Sam L,

Does this apply when I am just adding new drives into empty slots of the enclosure. I was not switching out a smaller harddrive for a larger one. I was adding a totallly new drive into an empty slot. I would have thought that re-configuring the virtual disk would allow the new disk to be a part of the Virtual Disk and it would be accessible by VMware without destroying the virtual disk. This would mean that I would need to have the entire enclosure filled (or the first half in split-mode) at the start.

Any clarification would be helpful before I destroy the virtual disk.

Thanks,

Speedaemon

Speedaemon · Answer

DELL-Sam L, It  was a VMWare issues.  Thank you for you help.  Your guidance help me to track down the right information from VMWare.

PowerVault

VMware 6 unable to access entire Virtual Drive on MD1000

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