One of the tasks that take a long time for me to complete is adding new storage LUNS to my ESX hosts. Due to the way MSCS locks LUNs, I need to do it manually across all my hosts. On the first host, I need to manually rescan the vmhba, run fdisk create the partition, utilize vmkfstools to make the disk, and then restart mgmt-vmware service. Then on the rest of my hosts, I need to rescan each of their vmhba (esxcfg-rescan vmhba1), rescan with vmkfstools the same vmhba, and restart the mgmt-vmware service. Even with cut-and-paste this is a long task across multiple servers.
Any chance of building cmdlets to help on any of these tasks?
I think you can address the latter part of your problem using the get-vmhoststorage -RescanAllHBA. So basically you could manually create the storage on the first host, then from VC you could run get-vmhost | get-vmhoststorage -RescanAllHBA. I'm told that if you rescan the HBAs remotely through web services (as opposed to on the COS) you don't need to restart hostd. If you could let me know if that works I would greatly appreciate it, otherwise I can investigate other avenues.
As for the other part of your problem, it is possible to partition remotely, but it seems to be pretty tricky at the moment. Unless you're feeling very adventurous you might want to wait until we have cmdlets. We're trying to see where this lands but it will be either our 1.0 GA release or our followon release.