RDM wil not show up in (Windows) Disk Mgmt

[sel57]

Hi all-

Wondering if anyone has seen anything flaky like this before with attaching an RDM to a Windows vm. Appreciate your thoughts.

Trying to attach a 500gb lun to a Windows virtual machine in physical mode, but it will not show up. I've tried a few different times, and I've seen it show up momentarily once in disk mgmt before disappearing never to be seen again.

My environment:

vCenter and every host is at ESXi 5.1.

VM was a p2v many moons ago, has existing virtual mode RDM attached

VM is 2003 SP2 Enterprise Server

What I've tried:

Created and attached RDM from EMC VNX. Everything works as planned until I try to rescan/view in os, never appears

Created and attached RDM from second EMC VNX as a test, same result.

Successfully attached original lun to different server, to narrow down issue to original vm

Refreshing storage of host where vm resides, multiple times throughout process

Rescan disk management, via gui and diskpart

Tried adding RDM to different scsi virtual device node

Refresh storage through manage paths

Checked event viewer to find error that "all paths to xxxxxxxxxx are dead", but this can't be right (in manage paths all are active, and the other lun is on the same storage array)

Rebooted server

Any idea what else I can try?

[sel57 · Accepted solution]

I think I figured this out. I just tried to add the new lun in virtual mode like the other attached RDM, and it finally worked. Perhaps you can't have different luns attached in different modes on the same server. I connect all of my RDM's in physical mode because I don't want them snapped, but this one vm I inherited was attached in virtual mode, so I was hoping to start fixing this with a new physical mode RDM to transfer some data to it. Guess not.