Clone VM with RDM

[fborges555]

HI gurus

 

How to accomplish cloning a vm with an RDM attached to it, it errors 

"The operation is not supported with virtual disks in independent mode or raw disk mappings in physical compatibility mode."

 

thanks for any help

[Scott Vessey]

 

Moderator: Moved to vSphere Discussions, this is a vSphere administration matter.

[Scott Vessey]

 

Do you also need to “clone” whatever data is in the LUN which backs the RDM, or not?

 

[fborges555]

S.

 

Thanks for jumping in, I would like to clone the machine with everything attached to it, so clone the vm and clone the RDM also as well.

 

Thanks

[Lalegre]

Hey ,

As the error clearly says you cannot clone a virtual machine with the RDM in Physical Mode attached to it as the cloning operations uses an snapshot temporarily and they cannot be used in that mode. However if your RDM is in Virtual Mode, the cloning operation will convert it to VMDK in the destination VM.

The only way of doing this is removing the RDM from the virtual machine, clone the same and in the destination one create the RDM once again. If you delete the RDM it will not affect the data as it only deletes the mapper files for the RDM and do not interact with the LUN directly.

 

 

[fborges555]

L.

 

The machine in question is on Virtual mode but I think  where I have the issue is on the "Disk compatibility " as is independent persistent

I have read if you turn the machine off, this cloning will happen, but I am not 100% sure of this

thoughts

 

Thanks again for helping

 

[Lalegre]

Hey ,

Oh then nothing related with RDM as it is a VMDK and yes the supported way of cloning the VM with independent disk is by powering it off first and then executing the action.

The explanation is here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1010396