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There are always challenges to match the Raw Device Mapping in VMware to the actual physical LUN from SAN storage. For current ESX 3.5 U3, what we had done to manage our RDM is all depend on the LUN name which presented at the management console from our EMC storage, and the LUN ID which publish at the vCenter management interface. In vCenter, there are numbers of LUNs presented to each ESX server which will be provided a unique LUN ID for each of the LUN. These LUN IDs should able to be match with the Host ID from the EMC navisphere web management GUI interface. At the same time, we had renamed the LUN to match with the virtual machine or ESX hosts which connecting to the LUNs for tracking and management purpose. These allow us to keep track every LUN been assigned to our Virtual Infrastructure.

In vSphere, the next version of ESX server, VMware had included the new features, which provide capability to rename the device’s name for each of the LUN been presented to the ESX hosts. This will provide alternative to keep track the physical LUNs which presented to ESX hosts and VMs too.

This show the device name had been modified to match with my datastore name. If you do assigned it to a virtual machine, you can easily rename it to the virtual machine name as you need.

Now the device name shown same as the datastore name. If you assign the LUNs to be a RDM on virtual machine, it will not able to be displayed on this screen. The only way to keep track is on the last screen shot which show the physical path which connected to the LUNs.