Hi. We have a SAN Storage and I am trying to attach a volume (from the SAN) to a VM.

If I create a new SR using that HBA connection, it asks me to format it. I don't want to format it... I want to attach the volume to a VM.

 

Is it possible to do that? 

I'm using Xenserver 7.6.

 

Thanks!

You need to attach the volume to your XenServer host (or pool, if not a single host) as a storage repository (SR) and then your VM can talk to it.

It should be possible to attach it if it already has a recognized format of an SR on it.

 

-=Tobias

If its a new LUN - XenServer needs to format it. so for a new Lun from Storage you need to "Format"it. 

You can do "Re-attach"only if this was earlier attached to another XenServer host/pool before. 

 

If you are worried if it would do something bad - no it wont if its a new LUN , it will format/wipe out the only-the-LUN and will make it XenServer-Friendly. 

 

The 

8 hours ago, Lucas Possamai said:

Hi. We have a SAN Storage and I am trying to attach a volume (from the SAN) to a VM.

If I create a new SR using that HBA connection, it asks me to format it. I don't want to format it... I want to attach the volume to a VM.

 

Is it possible to do that? 

I'm using Xenserver 7.6.

 

Thanks!

 

The volume is not a Xenserver volume. IT has ext4 in it and it was attached to another server (Linux) before.

So I cannot format it.

 

The option "Re-attach" is not shown to me, probably because this volume was never an SR before.

 

So, I have this volume (ext4) which was originally created from another Linux host (not xenserver) and I need to attach it to a VM. Is it possible?

I don't think XenServer supports EXT4. You may have to attach that to another Linux host to get that data copied 

over to a vdi attached to your VM.  Maybe the latest versions do,  but off the top of my head I don't remember 

reading that anywhere.

 

--Alan--

 

It might work if you encapsulate your existing external ext4 storage area that contains presumably data within an NFS export and use NFS on the XenServer side to mount it. You may even be ab;e to mount it directly from a VM if NFS is implemented on it.

 

-=Tobias

That sucks.... maybe this should be a feature request? 

The only local support for ext3 is for local SRs and it has to be local storage.  There is still no official support for ext4 file systems.