Testing an Extend; SERVER1: 2 LUN's published, SERVER2: 1 LUN published

[VirtualKenneth]

Hi,

I'm doing some tests with an extend (to simulate some failures in the past while using an extend) This is my setup:

LUN2 = 50 GB

LUN3 = 25 GB

ESX01 --> LUN2 and LUN3 connected and extend created (total size 75 GB)

ESX02 --> Only LUN2 connected

ESX02 gives the following error in the logs:

cpu1:1033)ALERT: LVM: 1355: One or more devices not found (file system \[testvmfs, 46d270ab-d0e58ced-85ce-001cc4439e2a])

So far everythings seems normal. I've filled up the 75 GB datastore with VM's of 10 GB per VM. The last created VM (VM7) should definitely reside on the extended LUN.

Now the strange thing, I'm able to copy VM7 from ESX2 to another location. In my believe this shouldn't be possible since that part of the extend (LUN3) isn't published to ESX02.

Am I mis thinking here?

Cheers,

Kenneth

[BUGCHK]

We don't know the VMFS allocation strategy, so we don't know which file is on which extent. Did you fill the VMDKs with real data or did you just create them? Maybe there is another optimization that tracks which parts of a VMDK has been written at. If you attempt to read from an unwritten area, it might just return zeroes.

[bertdb]

it does return zeroes as soon as it knows that the blocks are unwritten.

What I'm suspecting is that the copy was started from virtualcenter, is that right ? Virtualcenter chooses a server that can see the datastore to get a file, and that's not necessarily the server that you used to get to "browse datastore" !

[VirtualKenneth]

We don't know the VMFS allocation strategy, so we

don't know which file is on which extent.

The strategy is confirmed and is based on "first filling the 1st LUN and then the next one"

It didn't work this way in ESX2 however!.

Loosing an extend in ESX3 doesn't mean you loose the VM's that are not located on the extend.

[VirtualKenneth]

What I'm suspecting is that the copy was started from

virtualcenter, is that right ? Virtualcenter chooses

a server that can see the datastore to get a file,

and that's not necessarily the server that you used

to get to "browse datastore" !

Hmmmmm sounds like an explanation indeed. Let me verify this (with VMware)

To be continued..

Edit: While pressing the "Save" button I realized that I'm browsing (and thus copying) from CLI on the Host which is missing a part of the extend.

Message was edited by:

Vliegenmepper