RDM Existing Data

[kopper27]

hi

I have Storage which initially was used for normal physical servers....

Now the storage has been expanded and we have virtual enviroment here Vmware 5.

Cool. Now there a server that we want to virtualize which has a disk with 5TB info....

I was thinking to migrate only C Disk which is 60GB and create an RDM with the 5TB disk.

is it possible using RDM physical mode?

what happens with the existing data? it won't be damaged right when mounting the Windows D drive back?

I found this

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/new-vsphere-50-storage-features-part-1-vmfs-5.html

RDM - Raw Device Mappings

• There is now support for passthru RDMs to be ~ 60TB in size.
• Non-passthru RDMs are still limited to 2TB - 512 bytes.
• ....

thanks a lot guys

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Yes, you can P2V the OS vol and then make the necessary presentation changes on the volume/disk/LUN and add it as a RDM to the VM. I've done this many times and it worked exactly as expected, but always make sure you have backups with any operation like this. With ESXi 5 the 5TB volume would be supported as a physical RDM.

Good Luck!

[bym007]

Hi,

Sorry for waking up an old thread, however, I am facing a similar situation.

I have virtualised a Windows installation, and now have a 2TB Sata disk connected to the ESXi host.

I would like to mount it to the ESXi host and then the Windows install without losing any data on it.

I have tried to follow the vmfstools -r command in console, but I am not getting anywhere, as it keeps throwing error that the disk does not exist. I have checked the disk in vSphere client, and it is present in the Storage, and if I wanted I could mount it as a new datastore (which is no good to me).

Any ideas, what I am doing incorrectly. Many thanks for taking out the time to help me.