Vmotion with Raw Disk Mapping with HA/DRS Clusters

[Atlanta]

Hi All,

I have done some reading of the deployment guides and I am a little confused, I have an ESX 3.5 Resource Management guide that states Vmotion will not work with Raw Disk Mapping however there is a ESX 2.5 admin guide that says it is supported, so which is it? Does anyone know if vmotoin supports Raw Disk Mapping usin HA and DRS clusters? We are running a couple of ESX 3.02 servers but in stand alone mode, I have a need to add some additional boxes and add HA to the mix, however my underlying iSCSI infrustructure and snapshot technology require me to use RDM.

Shaun

[mitchellm3 · Accepted solution]

We run 3.02 and use raw disk mappings. Vmotion w/ HA/DRS clusters does work. We use RDMs in virtual mode. I believe this is what allows you to use vmotion. I'm not sure that a vm with rdms in physical mode can be vmotioned.

[vmroyale]

We also run 3.02 and use raw disk mappings with Vmotion and HA/DRS. The RDMs are in Physical compatibility mode and VMotion fine.

[Atlanta]

Thanks for the answers that is good news, just wondering what storage you are using, iSCSI or Fibre to your SAN?

[vmroyale]

I probably should have mentioned that! We are using fibre with the EVA4100.

[mitchellm3]

Fiber attached to IBM DS6800. Once we are done our testing, the storage will be virtualized behind an IBM SVC.