RDM or available LUN?

[lorimer]

I am adding a new LUN to an existing cluster. The cluster has ~150

vm's. Several of these vm's have 1-3 Raw Device Mappings. The problem I

have now is that the labels in the SAN management were less than

descriptive (vmware 01-XX). There are a couple LUNs that were exported

that are ready to be formatted as VMFS. Because of poor labeling and

poor tracking, I have no idea which LUNs are the ones that got exported

for vmfs. All the RDM's show up when I try to add new vmfs. How do I

tell which of those are in use currently as RDM's and which are truely

available to format as vmfs?

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

This one boils down to documentation. You will need to look at each RDM and determine its vmhba name equivalent. Then map those back to the SAN LUN, etc.

In this vmkfstools will be your friend, specifically the -queryrdm option.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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[kjb007]

If the RDM's are in use, and the new LUNs are brand new, then you can also run 'fdisk -l' on the service console. This should give you a partition description, and will tell you what type of filesystem is seen on those LUNs. This can go a long way to see if there is something on the disk as well.

-KjB

[lorimer]

"In this vmkfstools will be your friend, specifically the -queryrdm option. "

Awesome. The -queryrdm option is exactly what I was looking for.