Attaching a Raw Device Mapping to a virtual machine

A Raw Device Mapping (RDM) may be required in special cases where an application or guest operating system requires access to a device directly, or with a native filesystem on the device, unlike the normal methodology of the disk residing on a VMFS backed datastore. To enable this, a LUN can be directly provisioned to a virtual machine through the use of RDMs.

Getting ready

Present the LUN to all the ESXi hosts in the cluster, this is imperative to ensure virtual machine mobility. In a cluster, it's quite typical for a virtual machine to restart or migrate on other hosts, the LUN can be continuously accessed by the virtual machine.

Needless to state, this is a prerequisite for features such as vMotion and HA with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) so they work on the virtual machine in question.

How to do it...

The following procedure demonstrates attaching an RDM to a virtual machine:

1. Navigate to the VMs and Templates inventory view, select...