esxi v5 and dell md3200

[cfapress]

I have an interesting situation. I'm trying to share a md3200 by connecting one raid adapter to a real win2008r2 box and a virtual win2008r2 box running under vmware esxi v5.

The connection with the real (physical) win2k8 box works just fine. I've fully configured, mounted, and formatted the md3200 here. Easy enough.

The connection with the virtual win2k8 box is a problem.

I'm not sure where to start on the vmware side.

So far I've added the md3200 in the vmware console as new storage. But I don't want to format the thing as a virtual disk. I just want the virtual 2k8 machine to connect with the storage.

Is this even possible?

help.

Jason

[Dave_Mishchenko]

It sounds like you're trying to create a physical / virtual MS cluster.  If so see page 17 of this guide - http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-mscs-gu...

[cfapress]

Indeed I'm attempting to create a cluster with a physical 2008 box and a virtual 2008 box. Both run 2008 r2.

Following instructions from here
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=344326...
I created a physical RDM mapping to the md3200

I can see the md3200 in both the physical and virtual machines. I can write to the drive but of course the contents don't appear on the other machine since they're not cluster aware. But this was a promising step forward.

However the MS Cluster Services won't accept the drive as shared. The md3200 is seen but the TID and LUN are different between the physical and virtual drives as seen by Windows. That's as far as I could get before throwing my hands in the air and walking away.

Jason

[cfapress]

I've given up on this one.

I was able to create a physical mapping (RDM - raw device mapping) in vmware using the command line. Then I connected the vmdk file to the virtual machine. SO far so good.

Then the trouble ...

As best I can tell the TID (target id) and LUN of the shared stored do not match on the physical and virtual machines. I couldn't figure out how to make them the same. Because of this MSCS (MS Cluster services) would not install and simply gave a terribly cryptic message including variables such as %1 and %2 instead of the values. Dumb software.

I simply ran out of time to get this sorted out and gave up.

If anyone knows how to make the TID and LUN identical, or if you know that's not the trouble facing MSCS, let me know.

Thanks,

Jason