[esxi]RDC-ing 3TB drives

Wing

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Jul 28, 2012
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Hi,..i've been busy all day trying to get my onboard controller to pass through my hard drives to ZFSGuru (or freenas..whatever works)

\the problem is.. it is an onboard raid controller. AS i already got my virtual machines on the same controller, i cannot passtrough the whole thing. To get ZFS roperly working, I need to pass my harddrives through to the VM.

Now, it is possible to RDC the drives using SSH... which I tried.
I added according various tutorials the drives as RDC.

First problem is that I wasn't able to use >2 TB drives.

The solution herefore was using a -z flag instead of -r. I thought it worked. i attached the raw drives using "choose existing hard drive". ( http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=20192.0 )

I started up the machine and i've gotten the message: "the blahblahblah is locked".
Forums said i need to delete the lockfiles.. but i cant find them.

I rebooted esxi and try reinstalling the VM,.. but now the shares are gone too..

what can I do? I only have one slot for a pcie (since its a 1u server),. and i prefer to use it for infiniband in a later stage...

I'm completely out of ideas other than buying a HBA and loose my possibility to use infiniband
 
What is RDC? Do you mean RDM (raw disk mapping)? And what does ssh have to do with it? Is this such a high-end machine that you can't bite the bullet later and upgrade/replace the box if&when you go infiniband?
 
What is RDC? Do you mean RDM (raw disk mapping)? And what does ssh have to do with it? Is this such a high-end machine that you can't bite the bullet later and upgrade/replace the box if&when you go infiniband?

RDM, sorry, that's the one :)

ssh to login into esxi console to 'hack' RDM on the onboard sata controller.

Not really too high end...it's a supermicro 1u barebone with a xeon e3-1230. hence the 1u is the actual problem.

the infiniband is something i want to use for interconnecting a workstation. so instead of connecting the server through a gigabit port, i want to connect it using infiniband on a later date. Unless there is some way of having a dual functional card with a HBA and Infiniband in one. Or another way of interconnecting the servers.

sorry for the lack of context
 
What release of ESXi? MIght want to check here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2118774

Esxi 5.1,.

The topic is quite clear, but unfortunately doesn't give the solution.

The issue is a bit hard to get my head around.
The rdm method is that i added the lun storage. The 3tb drives give me 2.73 tb. When in console of esxi itself, i use the tools to direct the vdkm file to the harddrive. So esxi sees them as existing volumes instead of a raw disk. When adding, i see a nice and clear 3tb drive. However, when i start the vm, i get error messages like the lockfiles.

Its a bit of a bad workaround, since if one drive fsils i need to reroute the drive manually again. Altho it saves me a hundred euros extra plus a free pcie slot.


Does this explain a little better?
 
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