VMware Vsphere raw device mapping

Raw Device Mappings

What is raw device mapping?

Raw device mapping is a feature where the virtual machine can directly access the storage devices such as SAN or DAS.

With a VMware we will use vmdk pointer to provide the proxy facility to raw device.

In a virtual environment some cases we may need to have a raw device mappings.

Why we need raw device mapping?

• To configure Microsoft failover cluster, we can configure raw device as shared storage.
• When we are configuring Microsoft failover cluster with one node is running on as a VM & other node/s running as a physical.
• To run some of the san management software(ex hitachi horcm)
• To run some backup software on virtual machine, and needs to get storage level backup

How to Configure?

1. Here I have one vm which is prepared to mount raw device



1. Using new datastore adding procedure, we can see new lun which is provided from our shared storage(in my case im using windows iscsi server)

Advertisement

Powercli how to download esx log files

Üsing this script we can download esx log files to local computer, which is running powercli.

save this script as ps1

 

#############################################################
# We can use this script to downlog log files from esx hosts#
# #
# #
# #
#############################################################
Write-Host “Please create a esxlogs folder in your C drive before you run this script. This will download vmkernel,hostd & vpxa log files to your computer”
Add-PSSnapin vmware.vimautomation.core
Add-PSSnapin vmware.deployautomation
$vcentername=Read-Host “Enter Vcenter Name”
$esxhostname=Read-Host “Enter ESX host Name”
Connect-viserver $vcentername
$esxvmkernel=(get-log -key vmkernel -vmhost $esxhostname).entries
$esxvmhostd=(get-log -key hostd -vmhost $esxhostname).entries
$esxvpxa=(get-log -key vpxa -vmhost $esxhostname).entries

Add-Content -path c:\esxlogs\$esxhostname””vmkernel.txt -value $esxvmkernel

Add-Content -path c:\esxlogs\$esxhostname””hostd.txt -value $esxvmhostd

Add-Content -path c:\esxlogs\$esxhostname””vpxa.txt -value $esxvpxa

70-410 Module 11 Implementing Group Policies