So, plug in the new drive, configure it as RAID 0 (yes, even if it’s only one drive). In effect, it merges VMFS manageability with raw device access.īefore acquiring those pair of 1TB HDDs I tested the theory with a single 120GB SSD (Kingston SSDNow 300) in RAID 0 mode (otherwise the G8’s embedded controller wouldn’t present the drive to ESX).Īlso, before pluging in the drive, I SSH’d into the ESXi hosts and checked /dev/disks /dev/disks # ls -l /vmfs/devices/disks/ The mapping file gives you some of the advantages of a virtual disk in the VMFS file system, while keeping some advantages of direct access to physical device characteristics. The mapping file contains metadata used to manage and redirect disk accesses to the physical device. Raw Device Mapping allows a special file in a VMFS volume to act as a proxy for a raw device.
What I ultimately wanted was to take out either of the HDDs, plug it in a Linux machine and have access to all of the backup data. But I didn’t want a VMFS being the first layer in those two discs. For the backup scheme, I wanted to add another 1 TB RAID 1. Everything is installed on a 1 TB RAID 1 served by the embedded controller. It has ESXi 5.5 with some VM running on it. Note: An RDM can also be changed from virtual compatibility mode to physical compatibility mode.I own an HP Microserver G8 which basically has all of my stuff, music, pictures, documents, etc. Ensure that you use the SCSI device that you noted in step 3. Add the RDM back to the virtual machine as a new disk and select virtual compatibility mode.
Switching between Physical and Virtual pass through You cannot convert larger than 2TB RDMs to virtual disks, or perform other operations that involve RDM to virtual disk conversion.You cannot relocate larger than 2TB RDMs to datastores other than VMFS5.VMFS5 supports greater than 2TB disk size for RDMs in physical compatibility mode only. Physical mode also allows virtual-to-physical clustering for cost-effective high availability.
#Raw device mapping vmware esxi 5 software