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Some people had problems setting up Raw Disk Mappings or RDM's in ESX 2.x. This is the process to set the RDM's up via the Management User Interface or MUI. If you are looking to do this or having problems, then I hope this document helps you out a little.
The first thing that you need to do is sign into the MUI. Once you have arrived at the MUI and logged in you need to get to storage management. Click on the options tab and then storage management. Once in storage management confirm that the free space that you want to use for the raw disk is visible. If the storage is not visible then you need to check your config and if on a SAN then rescan. A common trap here for young players is that if the lun number is higher than the disk.maxluns setting in ESX then you will not see the disk on the san. This can also be changed in the MUI by going to the options tab and clicking on the advanced settings button. Do not set it higher than you need it to be otherwise you will be waiting forever to boot. Now close the storage management screen and go to the status monitor tab. Make sure the VM you want to add the disk to is powered off before trying to add it. Then click on the down arrow next to the virtual machine that you will add the raw disk to and select configure hardware. See picture below. 
Then follow these steps. select add device select hard disk select system lun/disk The target lun should be the disk that you want to have raw access to Use metadata should be ticked Set the metadata file location to a san address Put a descriptive title in Set compatiblility to physical
The disk is now configured for your virtual machine to see. Start the virtual machine and follow your normal steps to add disk from inside the virtual machine. To remove the Raw Disk from the server you need to remove the hardware from the virtual machine in the mui. Then From the status monitor tab select the manage files button. Select the vmfs folder and delete the .vmdk file for the raw disk mapping that was created earlier. Thats it! |
