Is it possible to create a vdisk larger than the largest physical disk?

[Dan-E]

I created a VM with a vDisk size of 6TB. But my largest physical disk is only 1.2TB.

Will the 6TB vDisk span across the array? Because right now Disk 1 is already full and the affected VMs are paused automatically.

 

Please help. Thanks in advance.

hpe-dl380-g9-diagnostics-20240306-0828.zip

[JonathanM]

12 minutes ago, Dan-E said:

Will the 6TB vDisk span across the array?

No. Each disk in the parity array is an independent filesystem, the user shares are a merged directory tree across same named root folders on all participating disks.

 

Technically the answer to your thread title is yes, you can create vdisk's larger than the available space because they are created sparse, and only occupy the space actually written inside the image. However, as you found out, when the containing disk runs out of space, the vdisk doesn't have anywhere to put the data, so the virtual filesystem doesn't work correctly.

 

Instead of using the parity array, you can assign multiple disks to a pool, which can use either BTRFS or ZFS RAID levels to create a single filesystem spanning multiple physical disks.

[Dan-E]

6 hours ago, JonathanM said:

Instead of using the parity array, you can assign multiple disks to a pool, which can use either BTRFS or ZFS RAID levels to create a single filesystem spanning multiple physical disks.

 

Could I also reformat my Array to zfs/btrfs and create a single filesystem for all of the disks in the array?

Edited March 6 by Dan-E

[JonathanM]

5 hours ago, Dan-E said:

 

Could I also reformat my Array to zfs/btrfs and create a single filesystem for all of the disks in the array?

 

10 hours ago, JonathanM said:

No. Each disk in the parity array is an independent filesystem

 

[Dan-E]

Just a followup question.

 

Is the multiple disk pool also protected by the array parity disk(s)?

[JonathanM]

16 minutes ago, Dan-E said:

Just a followup question.

 

Is the multiple disk pool also protected by the array parity disk(s)?

No. The parity disk(s) only act on the disks assigned with them.

 

Pools are traditional RAID levels, with whatever level of duplication you assign.