Tip of the day: VxVM and VMWare

In a VMWare ESX guest, if you try and go configure VxVM (VERITAS Volume Manager), you'll get a rather cryptic error when you try to add disks:

Error: VxVM vxdisksetup ERROR V-5-2-1814 sde: Invalid disk device for 'cdsdisk' format

Some googling brought me here, where I found that VxVM only support cdsdisk on SCSI disks - wait a minute, VMWare only supports SCSI disks, right? Right, but fortunately there's a command to determine if the disks are to VxVM's liking for a CDS disk:

[root@host diag.d]# /etc/vx/diag.d/vxscsi -g sdb
Cannot get disk geometry on /dev/vx/rdmp/sdb !

Gack, it doesn't like me! Good thing is that you can go ahead and set it up manually like so:

[root@host ~]# /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -i sdb format=sliced
[root@host ~]# /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -i sdc format=sliced
[root@host ~]# /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -i sdd format=sliced
[root@host ~]# /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -i sde format=sliced
[root@host ~]# vxdg init datadg sdb sdc sdd sde cds=off

For reference, CDS is cross-platform data sharing. What this does is overcome endianness limitations in sharing disks from say a SPARC host to a Linux host. You have to use the fscdsconv utility to convert the filesystem on it, though.