Add a VMFS datastore without formating

[sumitgad]

Hello, I have ran into the issue while adding a VMFS datastore to my ESX 3.5 Server. I am using netapp LUNs over iSCSi. I was doing a testing to recover a LUN by restoring the snapshot of a LUN to an alternate LUN and then assign that LUN to the ESX server. The LUN shows up in storage Adapters, however the problem is when I go to storage and do a Refresh it doesn't show up. When I then do add storage, it finds it but now tries to do a format on the drive which I don't want.

How do I add this existing disk so that ESX can see it without having to format the drive

[divintas · Accepted solution]

Hi,

the default behavior of ESX ist to disallow snapshots of an existing vmfs. If you want to use this snapshot you can set advanced parameter to enable it. BUT take care what you do.

See VMFS Volume Resignaturing in

Regards,

[sumitgad]

Thanks alot for the help. It worked.

I have set the advanced setting LVM.EnableResignature option to 1.

[Phylum]

I got some new drives for my main ESXi 4+ box recently, and moved the older drives to a 3.5 box.  Changing the setting allowed me to 'remount' the drives from the ESXi 4 machine without formatting.

Fantastic!