recently I moved a set of disks from one server to another.
After teh dell foreign disk import, esxi booted.
It was unable to detect the datastores, I followed these steps to scan for and add in the existing datastores?
<See below>
My question is, on a new install does esxi still format the disk and destroy any existing datastores?
I had heard that update1 would change the install behavior to not format datastores on install.
You need to tell it to detect the existing datastore:
esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /LVM/EnableResignature
esxcfg-advcfg -s 0 /LVM/DisallowSnapshotLun
Scan the volume:
esxcfg-rescan vmhba0 && esxcfg-rescan vmhba1
vmhba0 and vmhba1 are the volumes on your system.
Then login with the vi client:
Configuration->Storage
Select Rescan
Which will scan for:
New storage adapters.
Scan for new VMFS volumes.
Click Refresh
Then go back to the summary and change the name of datastore from
snap-blah
To:
datastore1 or whatever name you want.
Then turn the resignature option off.
esxcfg-advcfg -s 0 /LVM/EnableResignature
esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /LVM/DisallowSnapshotLun
We create a 5 GB volume to install esxi on, so we can reinstall esxi without affecting the existing datastore(s).
