Drive mapping

[kliest]

I am very new to VMWare.

I have an HP Fibre Channel San and two blade hosts running ESX 4.1
Each of the hosts has 2 guests each running Windows Server 2008. The virtual images are housed in the SAN in vdisks
I need to map a drive on my SAN for data storage but none of my guest OS's can see the SAN. I know the hosts can see it, as they are storing the images in datastores on the SAN!.
I have a third blade that is just running Server 2008, and this had no problem seeing the SAN and letting me map drives to it.
I have set up a LUN and tried to map that, no luck. I have been able to map the internal hard drives on each of the blades as a drive but not the SAN.
I just need to be able to map a drive, in Server2008 so that my applications can store data in a place where all the guests can see it.

I hope I worded this so its clear. Thanks for the help.
Kliest

 

[mrdenny]

You can setup a RAW device mapping and present this to one VM. Server's can't share disks unless they are in a Windows Cluster. You can present a disk to the Windows blade, and have the guests use Windows sharing to access the drive on the other machine.

Denny
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[Provogeek]

To present a LUN to a virtual machine, as Denny put it, you do a raw device mapping. This is done by assigning the LUN on the SAN to the ESX host (not the virtual machine). Then on the VM, you will create a new virtual disk, but select to do an RDM. During the process, you will be presented with LUNs that are not formatted with a VMFS.

Since you are using a fiber channel SAN, you will be able to create an RDM to this LUN on multiple virtual machines (this does not work with iSCSI). You should only do so when you are doing a cluster configuration. Windows is the only cluster technology supported by VMWare, but Novell's and Redhats also work (just don't call VMWare if you get into trouble, they won't support it).

But I seem to get the same impression Denny has gotten, you want shared storage, not cluster storage. Creating an RDM to your SAN for each of the guests with out using cluster technology will only succeed in corrupting your data. Follow Denny's advice and create the windows share (virtual or physical is your choice).



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