With RDM versus the method Kent described. It's a bit more complicated and will prevent snapshots and vmotion.
Basically follow what he said but instead of making a vmdk disk choose RDM and select a LUN. Then make sure that machine is NOT powered on, log into the esx host and move the RDM file to say /vmfs/volumes/volume_name/RawDeviceMaps ( you need to make that folder). Next manually edit the VMX for that host and change it path to the RDM to where every you moved it to. Now you can create new clones of your base template, and add the RDM drive to it ( as ken mentioned , its VERY important), pointing to the RawDeviceMaps folder and the correct RDM file for that LUN. This approach has many issue so I'm planning on moving away from it. 1) You can't clone 2) You can't snapshot 3) You can't vmotion 4) If you delete a host that has that drive attached you completely destroy the RDM file. (BAD JOJO) I you do need to have cluster in such an environment I would suggest a combination of the 2 approaches. 1) Build a new LUN and make it VMFS and let the ESX hosts discover it. 2) Create the VMDK's on that LUN not in you main VMFS for VM's 3) Make sure you set any OCFS drive to separate controller and physical, persistent ( so it won't snapshot it) You should retain snap/vmotion. But we aware. I am not sure if cloning will make a new vmdk on your VMFS volume you make for the ocfs drives. So I would have a base template I clone, then add that drive to the clone ( to guarantee the drives location). It's a bit more work that just saving the VMDK to the VM's folder on your main VMFS, but it separates the OCFS drives to another LUN. So you could easily stop your cluster, take a snapshot of the lun for backups and bring them back up. Limiting your downtime window. Might be over kill depend on the companies backup stance. Hope it helps David From: ocfs2-users-boun...@oss.oracle.com [mailto:ocfs2-users-boun...@oss.oracle.com] On Behalf Of Rankin, Kent Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 9:13 PM To: Haydn Cahir; ocfs2-users@oss.oracle.com Subject: Re: [Ocfs2-users] OCFS2 and VMware ESX What I did a few days ago was to create a vmware disk for each OCFS2 filesystem, and store it with one of the VM nodes. Then, add that disk to each additional VM. When you add it, use a separate SCSI host number. In other words, if the OS is on SCSI 0:0, make the disk SCSI 1:0, or some arbitrary other HBA number. Then you can go to each hosts second VM SCSI device and modify it to be shared, and of type Physical (if I remember correctly). At that point, it works fine. -- Kent Rankin -----Original Message----- From: ocfs2-users-boun...@oss.oracle.com on behalf of Haydn Cahir Sent: Mon 7/28/2008 9:48 PM To: ocfs2-users@oss.oracle.com Subject: [Ocfs2-users] OCFS2 and VMware ESX Hi, We are haing some serious issues trying to configure an OCFS2 cluster on 3 SLES 10 SP2 boxes running in VMware ESX 3.0.1. Before I go into any of the detailed errors we are experiencing I first wanted to ask everyone if they have successfully configured this solution? We would be interested to find out what needs to be set at the VMware level (RDM, VMFS, NICS etc) and what needs to be configured at the O/S level. We have a LUN on our SAN that we have presented to our VMware hosts that we are using for this. Any help would be greatly appreciated! _______________________________________________ Ocfs2-users mailing list Ocfs2-users@oss.oracle.com http://oss.oracle.com/mailman/listinfo/ocfs2-users
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