Can't add raw lun's if host is connected to vCenter

[Rattameister]

I have MS cluster drives in HP EVA4400. They are presented to my hosts. If I have standalone host then i can add raw disks to VM but if I add host to vCenter then those raw lun's do not show up any more.

Probably if I would unpresent those luns and present with different lun ID then they would show up but can't bring those luns offline.

Anyone has idea where i should start to investigate?

[Mouhamad]

Very strange..

So you are saying that the only diffrence is when you scan your LUNs by connecting directly to the host is fine, and when you scan through vCenter you can't see the LUNs?

[Rattameister]

Host is in vCenter inventory.

I create new VM with default settings and try to add raw HDD then at first nothing showed up.

I added totally new 1GB lun to EVA for testing and after while this is showing up now (lun 22).

All I have to to is to remove this same host from vCenter and then all raw luns show up if i try to add raw hard drive to VM.

I have latest vCenter 4.1 and host is build 433742.

I have done rescan on all hosts multiple times.

Strange is that if I look what lun's host sees under storage adapters then all those raw lun's are presented there.

Background - I had 3 G6 servers.

I installed G7 servers, new vCenter and moved VM's over.

But there is strange problems with this MS cluster disks.

[f10]

Hi,

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1010513 should answer this question

[Rattameister]

I will take a look at this KB.

Thank You!

[Mouhamad]

Please check the below screenshot and make sure you set the SCSCI Controller bus sharing type to physical.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

I think what you see is the expected behavior.

In a cluster environment you can add a LUN as an RDM only once. While adding it, a so called raw device mapping file (a vmdk file) is created. On the other MSCS node you have to connect to this mapping file (via add existing virtual disk) rather than to create another RDM.

Accessing the RAW LUN through multiple mapping files (if you somehow manage to create them) could cause issues with locking and possible data corruption.

André