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The addition or removal of Dell PowerMax devices to and from VMware ESXi is a two-step process for FC and iSCSI. For NVMeoF, it is a single step:
The process to discover changes to the storage environment using these tools are discussed in the next two subsections.
Note: When presenting devices to multiple ESXi hosts in a cluster, VMware relies on the Network Address Authority (NAA) ID or Extended Unique Identifier (EUI), not the LUN ID. Therefore, the LUN number does not have to be consistent across hosts in a cluster. Other hosts in the cluster can see a datastore that is created on one host in the cluster even if the underlying LUN ID is different between the hosts. Therefore, the Consistent LUNs setting is unnecessary at the host level, though some customers do require it for business reasons. The Consistent LUNs setting is not needed for NVMeoF since the NSID is already consistent (1:1 mapping).
Note: Microsoft Failover Cluster is one application that requires consistent LUN when using physical RDMs. Also, a known issue exists with datastore expansion in vCenter which is related to Consistent LUN. It can be avoided by expanding the datastore on the ESXi host and rescanning the cluster.
Changes to the storage environment can be detected using the vSphere Client by following the process that is listed below:
VMware offers the vCLI command vicfg-rescan to detect changes to the storage environment. The vCLI utilities take the VMkernel SCSI adapter name (vmhbax) as an argument. This command should be run on all relevant VMkernel SCSI adapters if Dell PowerMax devices are presented to the VMware ESXi on multiple paths. Figure 8 displays an example using vicfg-rescan.
Note: The use of the remote CLI or the vSphere client is highly recommended. If network connectivity issues occur, ESXi still offers the option of using the CLI on the host. Tech Support Mode must be enabled. The command to scan all adapters is: esxcli storage core adapter rescan --all. Unlike vicfg-rescan, there is no output from the esxcli command.