How do you identify the physical disk (LSI raid controller) in a VMware vSAN environment?

Answer

Answer

Complete the following steps to identify the physical disk in a VMware vSAN environment:

1. Download the latest MegaRAID StorCLI package by navigating to http://www.avagotech.com/support/download-search and searching for the “LSI MegaRAID SAS”
   
   
2. Install “storcli” on your ESXi hosts. For example:
   # esxcli software vib install -v=/tmp/vmware-esx-storcli-1.19.04.vib --no-sig-check
   
   

   
   

   # /opt/lsi/storcli/storcli show

   

3. Identify the current Virtual disk configuration using this command:
   ( /opt/lsi/storcli/storcli /c0/vall show )
   
   

   

   In this example, there is one (1) Raid1 Virtual disk for ESXi OS, two (2) Raid0 Flash virtual disks for Cache layer , and eight (8) Raid0 magnetic virtual disks for capacity layer for vSAN.
   
   Note: IBM Cloud does not support Raid Pass-through mode, we only provide the Raid0 mode.

Display all SCSI devices on current ESXi host

Run the following command:
( esxcfg-mpath -l|awk ';/Runtime/ {target=$NF;getline;naa=$NF;print target,naa}';|sort -u -k2 )

The first controller (C0) is physical CD-ROM, so you can ignore it. The second controller (C2) is LSI Raid controller. This target number always matches the Virtual number and you can compare it to the output of the storcli command. For example “C2:T1:L0” is virtual disk 1 labelled “VSAN-SSD” and “C2:T6:L0” is virtual disk 6 labelled “VSAN-SSD” as well.

To find out which disks are in vSAN, run following command:

( vdq -q | awk ';/Name/ {naa=$NF;getline;getline;use=$3;print naa,use}';|sed s/\"//g )

As you can see, one of the disks (naa.600605b00ae2b7501f3e855608b73b75) is “Ineligible” so this is the ESXi OS disk. Ensure that the “Ineligible” disk is a local datastore by running the following command:
( esxcli storage vmfs extent list )

Run the following command and map to vSAN disk.

( esxcfg-mpath -l|awk ';/Runtime/ {target=$NF;getline;naa=$NF;print target,naa}';|grep -v C0|sort -u -k2, esxcli vsan storage list |grep ^naa| sort )

Some bare metal servers provide MPX identifiers instead of a Network Addressing Authority Identifier (NAA) number. However, the way to identify the disk is same.