Corruption with ESXi 4.1, FreeNAS, ZFS, and Physical RDM

[jdubin]

I have a simple ESXi 4.1 install, successfully running various Linux, XP, and Win2K3 VMs. Hardware is an Intel DG35EC mainboard, 4GB RAM, one 120GB PATA drive (via a Promise Ultra133TX2 card), one 250GB SATA drive (via the onboard ICH8 chipset). The system boots from USB flash. It's been in full "production" use for the past year now.

I've added a 2TB WD drive (WD20EARS, SATA, 4KB sectors) and created a FreeNAS VM. The boot disk is on the 250GB SATA drive, and I want to give this VM raw access to the 2TB drive. Following the directions at

I'm not entirely sure where to start looking for answers, but since others (AFAIK) are using these drive successfully with FreeNAS (without VMware), I'm thinking that creating an RDM isn't as raw as I expected and is creating an issue. Anyone have any ideas what might be going on and what I can do to fix it? I'm stumped. Thanks for any help you guys can provide!

[jdubin]

Update: I started from scratch, this time using vmkfstools -r (instead of -z, which I thought would have been "cleaner"). Everything seems to be working just fine now. No corruption - though speed leaves something to be desired.

So, what exaclty is the difference these two switches? And, is there sometplace I can find documentation which explains RDMsand such in better detail?

[AndreTheGiant]

The -z option use a passthru function.

In this case the controller must be dedicated only for this disk and VM.

Where is installed you ESXi?

Andre