Just thought I would share with the world what I just ran into. I was following these instructions in this VMware KB about configuring tape drives and media changers within VMs. I have a customer with a Exabyte VXA-3 Packetloader that we have connected to an Adaptec SCSI card (dedicated only to the backup VM). Anyway, the SCSI card shows up as vmhba2 to ESX. I initially tried to map it to SCSI(1:0) and SCSI(1:1) (Media Changer and Tape Drive). My VM wouldn’t boot. So, I chaned the mappings to SCSI(2:0) and SCSI(2:1) and the VM now boots.
Just a little gotcha, but I’m wondering if ESX likes to see the SCSI controller number match up with the hba controller number? Not a pro at such low-level details. If anyone has further insight I would be interested.
UPDATE: This setup had a small glitch today (last few weeks). The tape autoloader was being seen through the Windows VM, but the tape drive had disappeared according to the Windows VM. The tech on the scene was able to verify that ESX was seeing both SCSI devices. Below is the output of cat /proc/scsi/scsi
[root@esx1 root]# cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: EXABYTE Model: VXA 1×10 1U Rev: A110
Type: Medium Changer ANSI SCSI revision: 04
Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
Vendor: EXABYTE Model: VXA-3 Rev: 3231
Type: Sequential-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Well, after scratching our collective heads for a little while, we when ahead and got “old school” on the problem. Power cycle the tape drive and autoloader, and restart the VM. Poof! Problem solved. Duh!
Sometimes we can think too hard about problems with VMware. We didn’t waste too much time with this problem, but we could have. Don’t forget the simple things when troubleshooting.
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