I am having a problem with a VM which I cannot get a 10.9 TB RAW storage to be seen from the guest.
Here is the environment:
-ESXi 5.1 - latest
-Adaptec 5805 PCIe (passthrough to vm)
-Windows 7 Ultimate x64 is the VM.
I have an existing VM (Win7 Ult x64) which I added in the Adaptec RAID PCI device (coming as physical passthrough). I had created a RAID 6 array (in RAID BIOS) of 8x 2TB drives which shows as 10.9 TB total. I'm trying to pass this through as physical RDM to the VM.
The driver for the adaptec card loads on the guest (I've tried both the Windows driver and loaded the Adaptec driver with same result), but I cannot see my RAW disk in Windows Disk Management. So if I load the Adaptec Storage Manager for Windows, and blow away the RAID 6 array right there, and try to create another RAID 6 array, it will create it but down-size it (only allows max size of) to 2 TB, so I then have a RAID 6 array with 8x separate 2TB disks which are 2TB RAW size each.
It does then show up as 2 TB RAW in Disk Management. So it appears to me that either the VMware guest's BIOS is restricting it, or something else in the OS is restricting it from being able to address the large disk size. I can also set up 8 separate JBOD disks and they all show up fine in Disk Management as 8x 2TB RAW drives.
I know it CAN work, because at some point in my testing around 3 weeks ago, I did have a Windows 7 x64 VM which could see all 10.9 TB of space, but I do not know what I am doing different this time which is not allowing the space to be seen.
Other tidbit of info is that when I created this VM it seems I may have accidently selected the Virtual Machine setting's OS (on drop-down menu) to be 'Windows XP Professional x64-bit' when it was made, then I fresh installed Win 7 Ultimate x64 to that. I have since changed that setting to 'Windows 7 x64' from the drop-down menu, and I also tried the option for 'Upgrade Virtual Hardware' (when you right-click on the VM in the left pane) with no difference in behavior.
So I am at a loss here on why it is not working, since it should support up to 64TB size I would think (seen in the ESXi 5.1 Configuration Maximums Guide). This VM also has 2 other VMDKs, one for OS, and one for a 1TB virtual disk which should not have anything to do with PCI RAID card storage I'm passing through. Does the OS have to be installed on VMFS5 disk for it to be able to address the large space on a separate passthrough PCIe RAID disk?
Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get the VM guest to see all 10GB of RAW space? Also BTW, this is not a boot drive, only gonna be for storage.