6.0.1

Table 18‑1. Features Available with Virtual Disks and Raw Device Mappings (Continued)
ESXi Features Virtual Disk File Virtual Mode RDM Physical Mode RDM
Snapshots Yes Yes No
Distributed Locking Yes Yes Yes
Clustering Cluster-in-a-box only Cluster-in-a-box
cluster-across-boxes
Physical-to-virtual clustering
cluster-across-boxes
SCSI Target-Based Software No No Yes
VMware recommends that you use virtual disk les for the cluster-in-a-box type of clustering. If you plan to
recongure your cluster-in-a-box clusters as cluster-across-boxes clusters, use virtual mode RDMs for the
cluster-in-a-box clusters.
Create Virtual Machines with RDMs
When you give your virtual machine direct access to a raw SAN LUN, you create an RDM disk that resides
on a VMFS datastore and points to the LUN. You can create the RDM as an initial disk for a new virtual
machine or add it to an existing virtual machine. When creating the RDM, you specify the LUN to be
mapped and the datastore on which to put the RDM.
Although the RDM disk le has the same.vmdk extension as a regular virtual disk le, the RDM contains
only mapping information. The actual virtual disk data is stored directly on the LUN.
This procedure assumes that you are creating a new virtual machine. For information, see the vSphere Virtual
Machine Administration documentation.
Procedure
1 Right-click any inventory object that is a valid parent object of a virtual machine, such as a data center,
folder, cluster, resource pool, or host, and select New Virtual Machine.
2 Select Create a new virtual machine and click Next.
3 Follow the steps required to create a virtual machine.
4 On the Customize Hardware page, click the Virtual Hardware tab.
5 (Optional) To delete the default virtual hard disk that the system created for your virtual machine,
move your cursor over the disk and click the Remove icon.
6 From the New drop-down menu at the boom of the page, select RDM Disk and click Add.
7 From the list of SAN devices or LUNs, select a raw LUN for your virtual machine to access directly and
click OK.
The system creates an RDM disk that maps your virtual machine to the target LUN. The RDM disk is
shown on the list of virtual devices as a new hard disk.
8 Click the New Hard Disk triangle to expand the properties for the RDM disk.
9 Select a location for the RDM disk.
You can place the RDM on the same datastore where your virtual machine conguration les reside, or
select a dierent datastore.
N To use vMotion for virtual machines with enabled NPIV, make sure that the RDM les and the
virtual machine les are located on the same datastore. You cannot perform Storage vMotion when
NPIV is enabled.
vSphere Storage
210 VMware, Inc.