Posts in Virtualization

Getting ESX server to recognize Clariion devices

While setting up two new ESX 3.0 server nodes, I ran into a bizarre problem where the VI client refused to initialize several Clariion CX700 devices. Since the VI client isn't the best environment to debug problems, I ssh'ed into the service console, and began my research by running esxcfg-vmhbadevs to list the devices on the system: This listed the correct number of devices, so I decided to use dd to read data from one of the devices that was causing problems: Dd worked fine, but I was still unable to create a file system with the VI client or vmkfstools: To get a better idea of the disk device layout. I decided to run fdisk to list the label type and layout of each device: Hmmm -- each Clariion device contained an SMI label, and I started to wonder if this was causing the problem. To test my hypothesis, I used the fdisk utility to write a DOS label to one of the problematic devices: Once I labeled the device with a DOS label, vmkfstools and the VI client allowed me to initialize and use the device…