RDM device from ESX - can't get disk paramters?

[Darren Reed]

On 12/03/2016 10:33 PM, Darren Reed wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Oh host A I had a set of disks mapped with ESX as RDMs
> to a FreeBSD 9.3 VM. No problem, works fine. The goal
> is to move that VM to a new host, so I migrate the VM
> over and then take the hard drives out of the old host
> and put them in the new one. However when FreeBSD boots
> it doesn't let me use the hard drives - they probe ok
> through the boot sequence:
>
> da3: <ATA xxx 82.0> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
> da3: Serial Number      xxx
> da3: 6.600MB/s transfers (16bit)
> da3: 0MB (0 512 byte sectors: 0H 0S/T 0C)
> da3: quirks=0x8<4K>
> ...
> da5 at mpt1 bus 0 scbus3 target 0 lun 0
> da5: <ATA xxx 82.0> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
> da5: Serial Number      xxx
> da5: 6.600MB/s transfers (16bit)
> da5: 0MB (0 512 byte sectors: 0H 0S/T 0C)
> da5: quirks=0x8<4K>
>
> but an fdisk:
>
> fdisk: can't get disk parameters on /dev/da3
> fdisk: cannot open disk /dev/da3: No such file or directory
>
> fdisk: can't get disk parameters on /dev/da5
> fdisk: cannot open disk /dev/da5: No such file or directory
>
> I can't do anything with these devices:
>
> dd if=/dev/da3
> dd: /dev/da3: Device not configured
> 0+0 records in
> 0+0 records out
> 0 bytes transferred in 0.000717 secs (0 bytes/sec)
>        0       0       0
>
> Does anyone have any clues about what's gone (or is) wrong?

I did a bit more looking at what I'd done previously and the answer
to my question is this:

when creating the RDM with vmkfstools, use the "-a lsilogic" option.

Cheers,
Darren