w00f wrote:
Did you try that :http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/
Absolutely did. This is what I referred to in in the original post above. When I issued the vmkfstools command, I got:
Failed to create virtual disk: The destination file system does not support large files (12)
I presumed that the text of the error message is a bit off (which dest filesystem does not support what large files?), but nothing I did could make it go away.
Now that I read your response, and then went back to that post, something just hit me. The xxx-rdmp files that he mentions in step 4 (created as a result of the vmkfstools -z) have a file size indication that's huge (effectively the size of the raw HDD), although in practice they are supposed to be tiny. Since my drives are 4TB, and I don't recall exactly right now on which FS I placed the data store during my experimentation, then maybe - just maybe - some file size limit filter somewhere kicked in and told me that I can't have a 4TB-size file. Hmm!
w00f wrote:
i've done it myself (using not SATA on board but a 3ware RAID ); i had a raid5 with existing partition (20TB) that i couldn't "break"; raw mapping system disk on the array + stoarage one and the VM booted like a charm with no update to do (except adding vmware tools)
In that case I envy you 
Did not work for me.
You do say it's a 20TB "disk" so if my theory above is correct you'd have hit the same issue, but I need to go back and see on which filesys I placed the data store. There might be an answer lurking there. Time to rebuild the lab.
Thank you!