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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