Add Hard Disks to the First VM, first node of a WSFC, for Clusters Across Physical Hosts with pRDMs

In an WSFC cluster with shared disk, storage disks are shared between nodes.

Prerequisites

Before you add hard disks to the first node, complete the following tasks:

• If you are using physical compatibility mode RDMs, ask your SAN administrator for the location of unformatted SAN LUNs. The hard disks you create in this task must point to SAN LUNs.
• If you are using vVols storage for shared disk, please see Add Hard Disks to the First Node for Clusters Across Physical Hosts with VMware vSphere^® Virtual VolumesTM.
• If you are using Clustered VMDKs on VMFS datastores, please see Add Hard Disks to the First Node for Cluster Across Physical Hosts with Clustered VMDKs on VMFS datastores.

Note: Use RDMs in physical compatibility mode.

Procedure

1. In the vSphere Client, select the newly created virtual machine, right-click and select Edit Settings.
2. Click the New device drop-down menu, select SCSI Controller.
3. In new SCSI Controller, select VMware Paravirtual and set SCSI Bus Sharing to Physical. Click OK.
   Note: LSI SAS is supported, but VMware Paravirtual is recommended.
4. Select the newly created virtual machine in step 1, right-click and select Edit Settings.
5. Click the New device drop-down menu, select RDM Disk.
6. Select an unformatted LUN and click OK.
7. Expand New Hard disk and select a datastore for Location.
   This datastore must be on shared storage because you need a single shared RDM file for each shared disk.
8. Select Physical as the compatibility mode.
9. Select the newly created SCSI controller in step 2, for virtual device node (for example, select SCSI (1:0)).
   Note: This must be a new SCSI controller. You cannot use SCSI 0. SCSI controller 0 is reserved for boot disks and disks which should not be shared
10. Click OK.
    The wizard creates a new hard disk.