I am setting up a small ESX datacenter for my company. The setup consists of a Dell PowerEdge 2950 connected via iSCSI to a Dell PowerVault MD3000i. The first Dell 2950 ESX host connected to a 1TB LUN on the MD3000i and created a single VMFS volume without any problems. To do this I added the 2950 (named esx01) to a host group on the MD3000i, and granted access for the host group to the LUN. I then rescanned the iSCSI storage adapter and the LUN was identified right away. I then added the storage to the host and created a datastore with a VMFS volume named esx-disk01. I have since added a few VMs onto the host and everything is running well, I even tested path failover from the 2950 to the md3000i and it is working wonderfully.
I am now wanting to add an additional Dell 2950 to the ESX datacenter, and even a third after this, but I am taking this one server at a time. I have succesfully installed ESX Server 3.5 on the new 2950 (named esx02) and added the new ESX host to my Virtual Center server in the same Datacenter as esx01. I added esx02 to the host group on the MD3000i so that it would have access to the LUN containing the VMFS volume esx-disk01. I then go to the Configuration tab of esx02, click on Storage Adapters, and rescan the iSCSI Software Adapter and successfully see the LUN that contains esx-disk01. It is the next step I am having trouble with. How do I get esx02 to use the datastore containg the VMFS volume esx-disk01? I clicked on Storage under the Configuration tab and went to Add Storage. As I continue through the Add Storage wizard I can select the LUN containg esx-disk01 but it wants to format it and create a new VMFS volume. I do not want to format the volume, I want to retain the VMs that I created already. Where am I going wrong? I want to be able to connect both hosts to the same 1TB VMFS volume, esx-disk01, that was created by esx01 on the mD3000i. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
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