We have some DL380 G5 servers with a P800 controller and a MSA50 enclosure. The enclosure is full of disks to have 1,2TB of storage in RAID5. ESX 3 fully supports the P800 controller and the MSA50 enclosure if you have the correct patch level. For ESX 3.0.2 it is best to run update 1.
ESX sees the 1,2TB volume but when we want to create a VMFS volume on it we get the following:
Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to update disk partition information.
In the vmkernel log, we see:
WARNING: SCSI: 5739: Can't write through read-only handle 0x741
WARNING: SCSI: 5616: status Read only, rstatus 0xc0de00 for vmhba1:0:0.residual R 999, CR 80, ER 3
BC: 1521: Failed to flush buffer for object def5 16 6 3 1eee350000000000: Read only
WARNING: SCSI: 5739: Can't write through read-only handle 0x770
The only way to create the VMFS volume is with the service console and the following commands:
- Run fdisk /dev/cciss/c1d0 and then type n to create a new partition, t to change the partition id to fb and w to write partition table to disk.
- Run the following vmkfstools command to create the VMFS volume: vmkfstools -C vmfs3 -b 8M -S volumelabel vmhba1:0:0:1
We use c1d0 because it's the second controller and the first logical disk and vmhba1:0:0:1 because it is the first partitition we are creating.
We have opened a support call with VMware to find out why exactly this is happening because we would like to create volumes (and basically do all our management) with the GUI. I know, I know, not cool but it makes life a bit easier for those who have to implement our procedures.
