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Installation Fails During Service Console Installation on Disk Arrays That Are Greater Than or Equal to 1TB

Details

Why did I receive an error message indicating that ESX Server is unable to initialize or read from the disk?

Solution

You cannot install ESX Server on a disk array (or LUN) that is greater than 1TB in capacity, because the kernel that is used during the installation cannot partition such a large array.

When you start such an installation, you are prompted to initialize the array.

  • If you choose Yes, the following error message appears:

    No such file or directory on read on /tmp/sda.

  • If you choose No, this message appears:

    No device found suitable for install.

You can, however, install ESX Server on a box that has two disk arrays, including one less than 1TB and the other more than 1TB (but not 2TB or larger.)

General Guidelines

  • For LUN sizes under 1TB, or on a pre-partitioned LUN, use the normal installation method.
  • For LUN sizes at or above 1TB (but less than 2 GB), use a partitioning utility to partition your LUN, then install ESX Server.
  • LUN sizes at or above 2TB are not supported as installation targets.
Approach Using Logical Drives with Smaller Sizes

Using the vendor?s RAID configuration tool, create two logical drives, with the following specifications.

  1. Make the first RAID logical drive less than 1TB in size (typically, about 100GB).
  2. Install ESX Server on this smaller drive.
    • Refer to http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1506 for partitioning recommendations of the smaller drive during the installation (custom install).
    • Leave about 50GB to use later in creating a local VMFS volume on the smaller drive.
    • Initialize the second, larger drive only after ESX Server is installed.
  3. Reboot ESX Server.
  4. Use the management interface (MUI) to create a VMFS core dump partition and new VMFS volumes on the first and second logical drives.
  5. Create a VMFS swap file on one of the local VMFS volumes, and set it to be activated at boot time.
Approach Using a Third-Party Tool to Create Basic Linux Partitions on LUNs Larger Than or Equal to 1TB in Size
  1. Boot your server from Linux distribution CD.
  2. Refer to the partitioning recommendations in http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1506.
  3. Create separate Linux ext3 and Linux swap partitions.
  4. Reboot your server with the ESX Server installation CD.
  5. Choose a custom install, and install ESX Server on the existing partitions.
  6. Select each of these partitions to be mounted on the appropriate mount points.

    Note: Ignore partitioning VMFS and vmkcore file systems for now.

  7. After ESX Server reboots, use the management interface to create a VMFS coredump partition and new VMFS volumes.
  8. Create a VMFS swap file on one of the local VMFS volumes and set it to be activated at boot time.

Keywords

1639; urlz; esx251; esx25; esx252; BFS; SAN; 1; tb; terabyte; limit; bigger

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Actions
  • KB Article: 1639
  • Updated: Aug 14, 2009
  • Products:
    VMware ESX
  • Product Versions:
    VMware ESX 2.5.x