PowerFlex: How to Identify the Physical location of an SVM Disk (RDM - Raw Device Mapping)

Summary: How to Identify the Physical location of an SVM Disk (RDM - Raw Device Mapping)

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Instructions

Description

How to correlate between SVM's RDM Disks and the Physical disk Devices.

Steps

SVM Level:

List All or Specific Disks:

List all disk devices:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ | grep scsi- | awk {'print $9 " " $11'} | sed -r 's/^.{6}//' | awk {'print $0'} | sed 's/..\/..\///g'

List all disk devices Example:

ScaleIO:/ # ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ | grep scsi- | awk {'print $9 " " $11'} | sed -r 's/^.{6}//' | awk {'print $0'} | sed 's/..\/..\///g' 6000c2952e4e35b264b899761ba06af1 sda 6000c2952e4e35b264b899761ba06af1-part1 sda1 6000c2952e4e35b264b899761ba06af1-part2 sda2 600605b00a36937012d0034b35edc01b sdf 600605b00a36937012d0034b35f56b55 sdk 600605b00a36937012d0034c35fd1c74 sdh 600605b00a36937012d0034c3605794d sdc 600605b00a36937012d0034d360e0a83 sde 600605b00a36937012d0034e3616eb21 sdi 600605b00a36937012d0034e362001ee sdj 600605b00a36937012d0034f3629590c sdg 600605b00a36937012d00350363504f7 sdd 600605b00a36937012d00350363ed3de sdb 600605b00a3693701f92005d07062b43 sdl

List a specific disk (Example for /dev/sdg):

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ | grep scsi- | grep sdg | awk {'print $9'} | sed -r 's/^.{6}//' | awk {'print $0'}

To find a disk device identifier (Example for /dev/sdg):

ScaleIO:/ # ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ | grep scsi- | grep sdg | awk {'print $9'} | sed -r 's/^.{6}//' | awk {'print $0'} 600605b00a36937012d0034f3629590c
Note: In the above output, the disk device identifier is: 600605b00a36937012d0034f3629590c
The disk device identifier will be used in the following next step.

ESX Level:

Identify Physical Device:
On the ESXi level, you run a query multi-path command on that specific device you got from the previous command:

esxcfg-mpath -m -d naa.[disk identifier]

Example:

[root@/dev/disks] esxcfg-mpath -m -d naa.600605b00a36937012d00350363504f7 vmhba1:C2:T9:L0 vmhba1 sas.500605b00a369370 sas.60d00350363504f7 naa.600605b00a36937012d00350363504f7

From this output, we can see that this disk is logically located on Target number 9 (vd number 9), in the following order: Host Adapter : Bus Channel : Target : Lun

Note: The ESXi sees the Logical Disks (VD) and not the Physical disks (PD).

Identify VMDK File:
Grep the disk device identifier:

find /vmfs/volumes/ -type f -name '*.vmdk' -size -1024k -exec grep -l '^createType=.*RawDeviceMap' {} \; > /tmp/rdmsluns.txt for i in `cat /tmp/rdmsluns.txt`; do vmkfstools -q $i; done | grep [disk identifier] -B1

The output indicates the VMDK file bound to the disk device identifier.

Example:

[root@sio:/tmp] find /vmfs/volumes/ -type f -name '*.vmdk' -size -1024k -exec grep -l '^createType=.*RawDeviceMap' {} \; > /tmp/rdmsluns.txt [root@sio:/tmp] for i in `cat /tmp/rdmsluns.txt`; do vmkfstools -q $i; done | grep 600605b00a36937012d0034f3629590c -B1 Disk /vmfs/volumes/58076039-ede5c01f-4fde-90e2ba7db974/ScaleIO-10.xxx.xxx.x/ScaleIO-RDM-565898493.vmdk is a Passthrough Raw Device Mapping Maps to: vml.0200000000600605b00a36937012d0034f3629590c4d5239333631

In the following screenshot you can see the RDM device in the vSphere Client UI:
Virtual Machine Properties

 

Article Properties
Article Number: 000158283
Article Type: How To
Last Modified: 20 Aug 2025
Version:  8
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