Moving Disks to a Different Controller in vCenter Shows Not A Valid Partition Table

JockVSJock

I've had to add a disk to a VM (RHEL5) in VMWare due to space issues and at the same time, I've optimized the disks assigned to SCSI controllers, because some disks are for Oracle. It would have been 7 disks to one controller, however I split them up. One controller (LSI Logical Parallel) has three disks that pertain to the RHEL5 OS and the other controller (Paravirtual) now has four disks that pertain to Oracle, are assigned to it. Rebooted and seems ok. However when using the fdisk command a number of the partitions are showing the following:

[root@server etc]# fdisk -l | less Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sde doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sdf doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/dm-2 doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/dm-3 doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/dm-4 doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/dm-5 doesn't contain a valid partition table /dev/sda2              14        6527    52323705   8e  Linux LVM

So far the guest seems ok, and I have a snapshot to fall back on, however it bothers me to see this. Was wondering if anyone has come across this before when moving disks between SCSI controllers and what to make of it? thanks

Essendon

I had something similar a long time back and from memory it was to do with the ID of the SCSI controller. Maybe the fix was to move the disks to the same controller ID as before IIRC.

JockVSJock

I think I understand what your saying, however in this case I only had one controller (SCSI Controller 0/LSI Logic Parallel) with 7 disks attached to it to begin with.

-HD 1 0:0
-HD 2 0:1 
-HD 3 0:2 
-HD 4 0:3 
-HD 5 0:4 
-HD 6 0:5 
-HD 7 0:6 

Then I created a new controller (SCSI Controller 1/Paravirtual), kept all of the OS disks on one controller and all of the Oracle controllers on another disk and now this is what I have:

SCSI controller 0/LSI Logic Parallel
-HD1 0:0 
-HD2 0:3 
-HD3 0:5

SCSI controller 1/Paravirtual 
-HD4 1:0
-HD7 1:1
-HD6 1:2
-HD5 1:3 

I think this is why I'm seeing what I'm seeing with fdisk, however the OS and Oracle database is working fine.

Again, I'm concerned with the fdisk output and wondering if there is a better way to do this in the future, in case I run into it again.

I'm not a VMWare expert by any means, I just work with it everyday and I'm very curious about it.

thanks