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Red_Squirrel
Contributor
Contributor
‎05-26-2009 12:46 PM

How to use a new lun

We just added a new lun to our ESX farm but when I go to add it, it says it's not a valid file system. Is there a way to format it into VMFS without the server even being able to see the lun? Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

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JarrettCampbell
Contributor
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‎05-26-2009 01:12 PM

Is this fibre attached storage? Did you rescan the HBA's before adding trying to add the storage?

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jcck20007
Enthusiast
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‎05-26-2009 01:19 PM

can you go through the steps on how you added the LUN and the screen shot of whats added perhaps ?

usually the ESX will format the new storage it sees/added as VMFS unless its NFS storage

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JarrettCampbell
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‎05-26-2009 01:25 PM

Before I can explain, I need the following info....

Is this fibre attached storage?

Is the storage connected to a fabric or directly to the ESX host?

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Red_Squirrel
Contributor
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‎05-26-2009 04:09 PM

Yes it's fiber attached storage. It is an IBM SAN (older one) with sata drives. What we did is logged into the san management console and added the luns to the same group as our VMFS luns. They probably have some other file system like ext3 or maybe even NTFS so they have to be reformatted to VMFS.

In ESX I did a rescan and it sees the luns now, but it wont let me add them as it says it cannot read the partition information (because I did not format them yet). So I need to know how I go about formatting them.

I did fdisk but I don't know what the lun will be called in the standard linux format (ex: /dev/sdb7 etc) and I rather not just assume it's the last one and then format it to find out it's not.

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JarrettCampbell
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‎05-27-2009 06:42 AM

I've never had to pre format any new lun prior to adding it- Formatting is part of the add storage wizard. After I rescan HBA's and the new lun appears, I run the Add Storage wizard of which step 4 is formatting.. It sounds like you have tried this- which step are you getting the error message on? Current Disk Layout?

I have never seen a SAN have a default format for a new lun, usually they are just blank disks- but if you SAN does, you may be stuck using fdisk. In that case, I can't really help you with dev numbering, but more than likely it is the last numbered sd device.

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Red_Squirrel
Contributor
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‎05-27-2009 07:10 AM

I actually don't make it that far. This is what I get.!file:///C:/Windows/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg!

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Red_Squirrel
Contributor
Contributor
‎05-27-2009 10:44 AM

Figured it out thanks to this post:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/45169

Works now!

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