Can I create a VM using a VMFS disk AND a raw disk mapping?

[somecallmemike]

I need to create a number of virtual machines on their own vmfs mounted disk space, and then I need to map a single lun across those servers so that I can put a cluster file system on that lun for shared access. Is this possible? I have been working inside vsphere for a few hours trying to figure out how, but the option for adding a raw disk is greyed out when I attempt to add a disk to the VM. (btw I am using the trial version right now, not sure if this has an effect on the outcome).

Thanks!

[casselc]

You can definitely do this. I believe you need to have a LUN visible to your ESX host that has not been formatted with VMFS for the RDM option to be selectable.

[somecallmemike]

Thanks, I figured out why I could not add it as an RDM, due to the fact that it was formated as vmfs. I did find this tutorial on how to share the lun from one VM to another, but I get file locking errors when trying to start a second virtual machine that has access to the raw disk from the first server that was configured. Any ideas?

[casselc]

The SCSI controller that the RDM is attached to needs to have SCSI bus sharing enabled, either in virtual mode if all VMs will be on the same host, or physical mode if on multiple hosts. The Raw Device Mapping section in the config guide has more information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_esx_server_config.pdf

[somecallmemike]

casselc, thanks for the response. I ended up figuring it out. I needed to create a new scsi controller on a different bus (1:0) to allow the sharing of physical volumes. Once I had that setup with the second disk I was able to add the disk to the other servers via the "use existing virtual disk". I simply had to search the data store for the first server I created and select the .vdmk file that was created by the raw disk mapping (usually diskname1_1.vdmk). Thanks!

[AntonVZhbankov]

You can combine VMDK (it can be stored on NFS in addition to VMFS) with RDM disks any way you want.

---

VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru