Tag: esx raw device

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

    clip_image001

    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)

    clip_image002

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