Problem mapping disk to Guest OS

[kurtdibble]

I am running ESX 4.1 on an HP Blade.

The blade has an internal hard drive as and is also attached to an HP MSA 2000 disk array via Fibre Channel.

I can see the disk from the host machine, I set up datastores and applied the virtual machines to those stores.

I am running Windows Server 2008 on the VM's

But I can not map a fibre channel drive from within my virtual Server 2008 instance. I can map to the drive internal to the blade, just not my disk array.

I am guessing I am missing a step.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

[a_p_]

Can you please explain what exactly you mean with:

I can not map a fibre channel drive from within my virtual Server 2008 instance. I can map to the drive internal to the blade, just not my disk array

What are you trying to achieve? Do you want to map a RAW device?

Thanks

André

[kurtdibble]

I am not really sure if an array of disks qualifies as a raw device.

I am trying to map a drive that is an array of disks. On a different blade that is NOT a virtual machine the array drives show up as a local NTFS drive (in Windows Disk Management)

On my virutal machines, I can not see this array as a local drive, yet the datastore is in fact located on this array.

Hope that clears this up.

Thanks

[a_p_]

Sill not 100% sure if I understand what you try to achieve.

However, the physical disks (or LUNs from the MSA) can only bee seen by the ESX host. The virtual machines don't see the physical disks/LUNs. The virtual disks are files on the VMFS datastores you created on the host. ESX presents theses files to the virtual machines as if they were real disk drives. This makes sure the operating systems on the guests can be used out of the box and the virtual machines can be moved from e.g. local datastore (your RAID array in the blade) to a shared datastore (a LUN on the MSA) without any issues for the guest OS.

André

[nkrishnan]

I think you miss to create VMFS on the Array. You have 2 option to present the disks to VMs

1) create VMFS on the array Open the VI client - go to configuration - storage and add the luns. This operation create VMFS (VMware filesystem) on the disk and you will loose the existing data on the array.

go to VM - Edit setting option and select Harddisk and add new virtual disk on the newly created datastore.

2) map the disk has RAW disk.

go to VM - Edit setting option and select Harddisk , you get a option to add the RAW disk, select it and present the lun as raw disk to your VM.

This help to retain the existing data / file system on the Array.

Nithin

[kurtdibble]

Thank you Nithin

I still have issues but I will try to track down an answer to them.

1. When I create a VMFS I end up with an error:

Failed to add disk scsi0:1

Faied to power on scsi0:1

2. The add raw disk option is grey.

to Andre,

I am trying to add hard drive space to a virtual machine. I need to have storage space available to my applications. In Windows you can "map" drives which allows applications to use that hard drive space. That is all I am trying to achieve.

Thanks

[nkrishnan]

Please try to following scenario:

1) Go to service console of ESX or connect your system using SSH

2) Run fdisk -l and make sure that your drivers are detected  properly,

3) using vmkfstool and create a vmfs file system on the drive (Anotherway to create vmfs on the drive), avoiding the chance of error comes in VI client

4) go to VI client and rescan the host. you must be able to see the new VMFS

5) go to VM properties and add the newly created VMFS on to the VM

Also please upload the Screenshot and logs for analysis and mention the steps that you have followed

Nithin