Wow, is that a 62TB drive in my home lab?

Posted by Paul Braren on Sep 7 2013 in

Remember this post, from Dec 16 2011?

Practical ways to deal with VMware ESXi 5.0′s 2TB virtual disk size limitation by Paul Braren on Dec 16 2011

Well, 2 Terabytes isn't cool, you know what's cool? 62 Terabytes.

With my new ESXi 5.5 GA build, passing through some or all of my 4 port USB 3.0 PCI card ports is working out quite nicely (passthrough/VMDirectPath/VT-D). But VT-d has some drawbacks, and it's become less necessary for my current configuration. Why? My affordable external Mediasonic HFR2-SU3S2 RAID enclosure can now simply be formatted as one big 5.6TB VMFS datastore, then VM data dropped right on there, for less crucial stuff, such as my daily backups. Yes, that is a ginormous 62TB drive you're seeing there. Admittedly, it's virtual, and thinly provisioned. I can't actually exceed my physical 5.6TB datastore limit. But I can pretend I can. I configured this using eSATA instead of USB 3.0 passthrough, with no RDM mappings needed. Simple, elegant, nice! And able to handle storage vMotion, should I actually upgrade the physical drive capacity at some point in the future. No resizing of drives, Windows just sees it as 62TB of NTFS.

Next stop, testing a VM with a modern OS, like Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials (Preview). This time, it'll start its virtual life with virtual hardware version 10, and a UEFI virtual BIOS. Then let's see if I can boot this massive 62TB GPT C: drive. A bad practice for so many reasons. But still, a lot of fun.

What else is next, for TinkerTry? Feverishly working on:

publishing a whole new streamlined ESXi 5.5 build procedure, geared toward homelabbers, and no more boot CD/DVD media, just USB, in glorious 1080p of course
a deep dive into USB 3.0 support
quick look at the Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB SATA3 drive
a close look at potentially using the Intel I350-T2 on my vZilla build, and its SR-IOV feature
SSD acceleration with the new vSphere Flash Read Cache, which may change some of my SSD read/write caching strategy, and boost re-reads off my slower tiers of storage
revisit VMware ESXi 5.1 can run Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 VMs, nice! techniques I documented first here on TinkerTry, back in September of 2012, but this time, looking at the GUI-less Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2012 R2 (Preview)
revisit Which hypervisor for your home lab, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Linux KVM, or Citrix XenServer? in my ESXi 5.5 lab
revisit the Superguide: Windows Server 2012 Essentials in October, when Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials preview becomes generally available
first-hand coverage of the upcoming Home Server Show Meetup 2013 in Indianapolis, Indiana on Sep 20 2013, come join us, with some 65+ enthusiasts already registered
into 2014, revisit passing through of faster interfaces, like USB 3.1, SATA 3.2 (SATA Express/M.2), PCIe, and Thunderbolt 2.0

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Wow, is that a 62TB drive in my home lab?

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