Hello,
I have a strange behaviour, using a 3TB SATA hard drive, connected to the onboard SATA controller as a RDM passthrough disk to a windows Server 2003 guest:
- The size of the "-rdmp.vmdk" file of the passthrough'ed disk ist correct, about 3TB - so, ESXi can handle the right an real size
- The size of the passthrough'ed hard drive is reported as "-128MB" in the disk management of the Windows Server 2003 guest
- A already existing 3TB GPT partition seems (!) to work correct - I have tried to fill the complete partition, move files, etc, doing a full chkdsk sometimes.... no errors. After showing the wrong and strange size, I expected to get a corrupted filesystem after writing over the 2TB border in my tests, but this does not occur!
- If I remove the already existing 3TB GPT partition on that disk in the guest and try to create a new one, a failure occurs, it is not possible - i think this is because of the wrong and strange size. The only way to get a working GPT NTFS partition is to startup the native 2003 system and do it there.
- Basically, RDM passthrough of disks >2TB works fine with ESXi 5.0 and the Windows 2003 guest - my main 3TB data disk, that resides on a RAID5 virtual drive using a LSI 1078 based controller, was a RDM passthrough disk since my migration from the native 2003 system to a ESXi 5 system before over a half year and is working fine and correct all the time since then - with showing correct size, certainly.
- The 3TB SATA drive can be successfully repartitioned and used as a datastore in the vSphere client using GPT partitioning, also showing correct sizes
- I'm using both disks, the SATA passthrough'ed disk and the passthrough'ed virtual disk on the RAID with the VMware paravirtual SCSI controller - So, basically, I think, it's not a problem of the virtual SCSI controller. BTW: a temporary change of the SCSI controller, the passthrough'ed disk was connected to, to a LSI parallel or LSI SAS controller in the Guest shows the same effect.
-> What's the problem here, that shows me the wrong size in the guest in case of a RDM passthrough'ed SATA disk connected to the onboard controller, in contrast to a similar RDM passthrough'ed virtual disk driven the RAID controller, working fine?
Thanks.