Installation guide

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VMware ESX Server Administration Guide
Labelling VMFS Volumes
If you create a VMFS volume on a SCSI disk or partition, you can give a label to that
volume and use that label when specifying VMFS files on that volume. For instance,
suppose you have a VMFS volume on the SCSI partition vmhba0:3:0:1 and have
created a VMFS file nt4.dsk. You can label that volume by using a vmkfstools
command such as:
vmkfstools -S mydisk vmhba0:3:0:1
You can then refer to the nt4.dsk file as mydisk:nt4.dsk (instead of
vmhba0:3:0:1:nt4.dsk) in a virtual machine configuration file and in other
vmkfstools commands. For more information on vmkfstools, see vmkfstools
Options on page 297.
If there is no persistent binding, then labelling VMFS volumes is especially useful if you
may be adding SCSI adapters or disks to your system. The actual disk and target
numbers specifying a particular VMFS may change, but the label stays the same. Also,
other ESX Servers see the same label, which is useful for LUN ID between servers.
For more information, see Using Persistent Binding on page 320.
VMFS Accessibility
There are two modes for accessing VMFS volumes: public and shared.
• public — This is the default mode for ESX Server.
With a public VMFS version 1 (VMFS-1) volume, multiple ESX Server computers
have the ability to access the VMware ESX Server file system, as long as the VMFS
volume is on a shared storage system (for example, a VMFS on a storage area
network). However, only one ESX Server can access the VMFS volume at a time.
With a public VMFS version 2 (VMFS-2) volumes, multiple ESX Server computers
can access the VMware ESX Server file system concurrently. VMware ESX Server
file systems with a public mode have automatic locking to ensure file system
consistency.
• shared — Used for a VMFS volume that is used for failover-based clustering
among virtual machines on the same or different ESX Servers.
For more information on clustering with ESX Server, see Configuration for
Clustering on page 329.
Note: In ESX Server 2.1, private VMFS volumes are deprecated. If you have existing
VMFS version 1 (VMFS-1) or VMFS version 2 (VMFS-2) private volumes, then you can
continue to use them, but we recommend you change the access mode to public.
There is no performance penalty in making this change.