Virtual machines with large capacity virtual hard disks, or disks greater than 2 TB, must meet resource and configuration requirements for optimal virtual machine performance.

The maximum value for large capacity hard disks is 62 TB. When you add or configure virtual disks, always leave a small amount of overhead. Some virtual machine tasks can quickly consume large amounts of disk space, which can prevent successful completion of the task if the maximum disk space is assigned to the disk. Such events might include taking snapshots or using linked clones. These operations cannot finish when the maximum amount of disk space is allocated. Also, operations such as snapshot quiesce, cloning, Storage vMotion, or vMotion in environments without shared storage, can take significantly longer to finish.

Virtual machines with large capacity disks have the following conditions and limitations:
  • The guest operating system must support large capacity virtual hard disks.
  • You can move or clone disks that are greater than 2 TB to ESXi 5.5 or later hosts or to clusters that have such hosts available.
  • The datastore format must be VMFS5 or later or an NFS volume on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server.
  • Virtual Flash Read Cache supports a maximum hard disk size of 16 TB.
  • VMFS3 volumes are not supported. You cannot move disks greater than 2 TB to a VMFS3 datastore.
  • Fault Tolerance is not supported.
  • BusLogic Parallel controllers are not supported.