History of vSphere Storage Size Limitations

This seems like a straightforward topic. If you are on vSphere 6 you can create VMFS datastores and VM disks as big as 64TB (62TB for VM disks to be precise). The reality is, not all customers are running the latest and greatest for various reasons. The most common one is concerns about reliability. vSphere 6 is still at version 6.0. Once vSphere 6.1 comes out we will see wider adoption. At this stage I see various versions of vSphere 5 in the field. And even vSphere 4 at times, which is officially not supported by VMware since May 2015. So it’s not surprising I still get this question, what are the datastore and disk size limits for various vSphere versions?

Datastore size limit

The biggest datastore size for both VMFS3 and VMFS5 is 64TB. What you need to know is, VMFS3 file system uses MBR partition style, which is limited to 2TB. The way VMFS3 overcomes this limitation is by using extents. To extend VMFS3 partition to 64TB you would need 32 x 2TB LUNs on the storage array. VMFS5 file system has GPT partition style and can be extended to 64TB by expanding one underlying LUN without using extents, which is a big plus.

VMFS3 datastores are rare these days, unless you’re still on vSphere 4. The only consideration here is whether your vSphere 5 environment was a greenfield build. If the answer is yes, then all your datastores are VMFS5 already. If environment was upgraded from vSphere 4, you need to make sure all datastores have been upgraded (or better recreated) to VMFS5 as well. If the upgrade wasn’t done properly you may still have some VMFS3 datastores in your environment.

Disk size limit

For .vmdk disks the limitation had been 2TB for a long time, until VMware increased the limit to 62TB in vSphere 5.5. So if all of your datastores are VMFS5, this means you still have 2TB  .vmdk limitation if you’re on 5.0 or 5.1.

For VMFS3 file system you also had an option to choose block size – 1MB, 2MB, 4MB or 8MB. 2TB .vmdk disks were supported only with the 8MB block size. The default was 1MB. So if you chose the default block size during datastore creation you were limited to 256GB .vmdk disks.

The above limits led to proliferation of Raw Device Mapping disks in many pre 5.5 environments. Those customers who needed VM disks bigger than 2TB had to use RDMs, as physical RDMs starting from VMFS5 supported 64TB (pRDMs on VMFS3 were still limited to 2TB).

This table summarises storage configuration maximums for vSphere version 4.0 to 6.0:

vSphere	Datastore Size	VMDK Size	pRDM Size
4.0	64TB	2TB	2TB
4.1	64TB	2TB	2TB
5.0	64TB	2TB	64TB
5.1	64TB	2TB	64TB
5.5	64TB	62TB	64TB
6.0	64TB	64TB	64TB

Summary

The bottom line is, if you’re on vSphere 5.5 or 6.0 and all your datastores are VMFS5 you can forget about the legacy .vmdk disk size limitations. And if you’re not on vSphere 5.5 you should consider upgrading as soon as possible, as vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 are coming to an end of support on 24 of August 2016.

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Resize limits for SAN LUNs

If you run lun resize command on NetApp you might run into the following error:

lun resize: New size exceeds this LUN’s initial geometry

The reason behind it is that each SAN LUN has head/cylinder/sector geometry. It’s not an actual physical mapping to the underlying disks and has no meaning these days. It’s simply a SCSI protocol artifact. But it imposes limitation on maximum LUN resize. Geometry is chosen at initial LUN creation and cannot be changed. Roughly you can resize the LUN to the size, which is 10 times bigger than the size at the time of creation. For example, the 50GB LUN can be extended to the maximum of 502GB. See the table below for the maximum sizes:

Initial Size   Maximum Size
< 50g          502g
51-100g        1004g
101-150g       1506g
151-200g       2008g
201-251g       2510g
252-301g       3012g
302-351g       3514g
352-401g       4016g

To check the maximum size for particular LUN use the following commands:

> priv set diag
> lun gemetry lun_path
> priv set

If you run into this issue, unfortunately you will need to create a new LUN, copy all the data using robocopy for example and make a cutover. Because such features as volume level SnapMirror or ndmpcopy will recreate the LUN’s geometry together with the data.

Limiting the number of concurrent storage vMotions

VMware vCenter allows several concurrent storage vMotions on a datastore. But it can negatively impact your production environment, by hammering your underlying storage. If you want to migrate several virtual machines to another datastore, it’s much safer to do that one by one. But it’s too much manual work.

There is a simple way to limit the number of concurrent storage vMotions by configuring vCenter advanced settings. There are a group of resource management parameters for network, host and datastore limits which apply to vMotion and Storage vMotion. They are called limits and costs. For ESXi 4.1 default datastore limit for migration with Storage vMotion is 128. And datastore resource cost for Storage vMotion is 16 (defaults for other versions of ESXi can be found here: Limits on Simultaneous Migrations). It basically means that 8 concurrent storage vMotions is allowed for each datastore. So to allow only one storage vMotion at a time you can either change the limit to 16 or cost to 128.

Lets say we choose to change the cost to 128. There are two ways of doing it. The first one is to edit vCenter vpxd.cfg file and add the following stanza between <vpxd></vpxd> tags:

<ResourceManager>
<CostPerEsx41SVmotion>128</CostPerEsx41SVmotion>
</ResourceManager>

The second simpler one way is to edit vCenter -> Administration -> vCenter Server Settings -> Advanced Settings and add config.vpxd.ResourceManager.CostPerEsx41SVmotion key with value equal to 128. You will probably need to reboot vCenter after that.

There is one moment, however. If you migrate VMs from say 3 source datastores to 1 destination, then 3 concurrent storage vMotion will kick off. I do not know what is the reason for that, but that’s what I found from the practice.