have you used Symmetrix DMX procedure generator ?

Home > Support > Product and Diagnostic Tools > Symmetrix Tools > Symmetrix Procedure Generator


also take a look at host connectivity guide for ESX:

Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Host Connectivity/HBAs > Installation/Configuration

I allocated 8 @ 505 GB luns. The host could add 7 luns but the 8th lun is having this issue.

i remember a while back there was a setting in ESX where it would only rescan so many addresses ..could that be the issue ?

I guess Dynamox is right .. ESX by default will scan only 8 luns (0..7).
I don't remember where is the setting .. however you have to increase the default

hmm ..it looks like default has changed in ESX 3.x, it now scans 0-255. Maybe Sudir's device is mapped above FF address ?

http://pubs.vmware.com/vi301/san_cfg/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=san_cfg&file=esx_san_cfg_manage.8.9.html

Thank you very much for your advice and support. The LUN ID was 47 (decimal). The issue turned out to be a VMWare issue. VMware logged into the box(Host) and configured the volume for VMFS and it solved the issue.

We just had this issue recently - if you reuse devices and just so happened to have picked your meta-head from a device that had a non-FAT filesystem on it VMWare can get confused and refuse to try and automatically format/use the drive.

I'll bet the fix from VMWare was that they use something like fdisk to delete/create a new partition on the drive?

Dynamox is right. ESX 2 only looked at the first 8 LUNs, but in newer version 0-255 are scanned.