Add new shared pRDM to 2 VMs - Downtime required or not ?

[vijayrana968]

The requirement is to add a shared physical disk/rdm to 2 Oracle Enterprise Linux VMs which are holding large oracle databases. I am not sure if downtime will require for both machines or not. This is confusion as in VMware documentation its mentioned to shutdown VM while adding pRDM but I am able to do this in Powered-On state. So for a new shared physical RDM, can I add to both VMs in powered on state ?

Version in use is vSphere 5.5

[Finikiez · Accepted solution]

Hi!

Share pRDM requires 'physical bus sharing' enabled on virtual SCSI controller.

So if you add pRDM and attach it to a new SCSI controller, you can do this without downtime.

However if pRDM is already added or you want to attach it to existing SCSI controller then you have to power off VM to change SCSI bus sharing setting.