Directly view a volume in a HP MSA 2312sa storage

[GustavoAyala]

I have ESXi 4.1 installed in 2 HP Proliant DL580 G5 both with shared storage MSA 2312sa (DAS SCSI storage with 2 controllers with 4 ports each one) and HP  SC08Ge HBA (actually an LSI 1068E)

I can create multiple datastores in the storage volumes and create virtual disk inside them and that's ok.

But I wonder if I can see directly from a virtual machine a volume in the storage without creating a datastore and a virtual disk inside it.

I've tried adding a SCSI device to the virtual machine, but I can only add SCSI device "unknow HP" which is LUN0 the enclosure.
But I cannot add directly a particular empty volume from the storage.

Thanks.

[LarryBlanco2 · Accepted solution]

The only way to get direct access to a lun is by using RDM (Raw Disk Mapping).

Carve out the disk space (LUN) and make it visible to the hosts.

On the VM, when u add a hard disk, select RDM.  It should then show you the unformatted lun.

Page 28:  http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_vm_admin_guide.pdf

Larry  

[GustavoAyala]

The problem was the option to add RDM was greyed out. But I googlead around and found that I have to disable RdmFilter.HbaShared.

After disabling that the option was available.

[LarryBlanco2]

Glad you were able to figure it out.  Cool beans..

Enjoy.

Larry