Scenario: All commandline based, using perl vmware tools, and direct ssh commands. ESXi 5 cluster.
On a SAN I take snapshots of a volume, I export the snapshot to vmware, rescan all HBAs, retrieve path to device,
vmkfstools -z args to map the RDM to a vmdk file.
All working thus far.
The next step (if my procedures are correct, if not please detail steps I may be missing) is to hot add this vmdk to a
running VM:
vim-cmd help vmsvc/device.diskaddexisting
Also tried above command using full path to the vmdk I created with vmkfstools -z:
~ # vim-cmd vmsvc/device.diskaddexisting 15 /vmfs/volumes/VmWareRDM/QA02/VC-database.vmdk 0 4
Reconfigure failed
We do this through a ssh script to the VM Host so I have provided the commands we use, this is for ESX 4 so if you are on ESXi 5.x you will need to update the commands to use esxcli and not esxcfg ones.