Deleting a LUN partition from the SAN drive through the Virtual Center?

[andy_eli]

Hi Everyone,

We just recently purchased an HP VMware package bundle from one of our suppliers. We uses the latest ESX and Virtual Center servers which is the v. 3.0.1 and 2.0.1 respectively. Earlier, we were able to create VM instance within the local drive of each server as well as on the SAN drive (LUN partition allocated for each servers). After sometime, we tried the converter package and tested on the servers and did some P2V and V2V. Most of the servers were migrated successfully until we have tested our ERP system. By default, one of its server has more than 400 GB storage utilization on different drives which primarily host the databases. Fortunately, we were able to find out that we need to increase the block size of that certain LUN partition from 1MB to 4MB in order to accommodate more than 256 GB disk storage. Now, it works smoothly and successfully converted/transferred the system from P2V and we tried to do it the same settings with the other LUN partition (incease from 1Mb to 4MB). After recreation of the storage on one of the ESX server (see ESX server -> configuration tab -> add storage -> Disk LUN -> detected HBA card) and setting it to 4 MB block size, it was able to add that storage perfectly on that server (e.g ESX1). We planned that that ESX2 and the rest of the ESX server can utilize that LUN1 partition. After adding storage on ESX2...x, the problem now arises. Instead of showing just LUN1 it recreates into LUN1(1) but pointing to the same HBA card which is not the case before since it only showed LUN1. The same happened with the other server where it recreates to LUN1(2). Thus, we planned to remove all LUN1(versions) pointing to the same HBA card and were able to delete on the other ESX servers except for the remaining server. When we tried to delete it on the last server having the LUN1, this message error came " Error during the configuration of the host: DestroyVmfsDatastore: can't delete partition 1 on vmhba0.0.2". I hope anyone could help us resolved this issue the soonest possible.

Thanks & Regards,

Andy

[jjohnston1127]

When you add a LUN and wish it to be shared between ESX servers, you must only add it to one server, then do a rescan on the other servers HBAs and do a Refresh on the storage for the second server.

it should show up on both servers.

As far as deleting it, try removing it from both servers, then recreating the storage and reformatting it as VMFS, then do the steps mentioned above to add it to the server.

Message was edited by:

jjohnston1127

[mstahl75]

VirtualCenter keeps track of old LUNs. In VC go to the Datastores section/tab and delete the original (now gone) LUNs and when you add it back it won't tack on the (x).

I haven't had to do that in a while but I'm pretty sure that is the process to remove those ghost LUN values.