I have a Cisco UCS rack server, with ESX 5.5 installed on it. It has about 6 SAS disks behind a LSI 12G SAS Controller. I have a guest VM (linux) installed on this ESX. I want to configure some disks as pass-thru devices for the guest OS to access the disks directly instead of accessing through the host as a vmdk file.
I am able to configure them as physical RDM using vmkfstools command, but the guest OS doesn't seem to treat the disk as real disk. Although the disk shows up as 'mapped RAW LUN' and full capacity is available to the guest, I suspect whether it is providing the full functionality or not.
I expect the guest OS to detect the disk in its original type (SAS, SATA, SSD etc.) instead of VMDISK when the disk is exported as raw device. But it still shows up as VMDISK every time. I'm also unable to see the disk's actual model/serial-number from the guest VM. Is it even possible to read the basic and actual disk info of the RDM disk from the guest vm?
Here are the some resources I followed already:
VMware KB: Raw Device Mapping option in the vSphere Client is grayed out
VMware KB: Raw Device Mapping for local storage
http://www.flexraid.com/2014/02/07/storage-deployment-vmware-esxi-iommuvt-d-vs-physical-rdm-vs-virtu...
Appreciate any help on this.
