Hello,
I recently upgraded my Dell PE 415 (Perc H700 controller) with ESXi 5.1 (Essentials kit) with 2 new hard drives and reconfigured the RAID1 virtual disk to RAID5 with 5.46 TB of usable space. The reconfigure was pretty uneventful and everything is working. However, I cannot increase the existing datastore to above 2.0TB. Initially I was able to increase the datastore from 1.81TB to 2.0TB even when the full 5.46TB was visible (and the 3.6TB or so of free space was selected to extent). After the extent or increase there is no LUN listed in the wizard or other space visible in the Datastore properties page when I click Increase. Also I cannot add the available space to a new Datastore.
I am not sure if the problem is related to a driver on the host server (storage, firmware, or vmware driver), the fact the the storage VMFS5 volume (VMFS5.58) is MBR instead of GPT, the version of ESXi 5.1 (5.1.0-799733-standard), or something else. I read that when upgrading from ESXi 3.x to 5.x Datastores were converted from MBR to GPT automatically and/or when extending the Datastore beyond 2TB. That does not seem to be working automatically in this case.
How do I increase the Datastore size above 2TB to use the entire 5.46TB?
I would like to pursue all avenues of non destruction means to add the remaining free space to the existing Datastore before other options are explored.
Thank you for your help.