ESXi 5.1
1x2TB physical disk
2x3TB physical disks
I have created a physical RDM mappings for each disk...
In Vsphere Configuration - Storage - Devices view, the 3 devices are listed, if I click on an entry the details are all correct - Parttiton format shows as GPT and a legacy MBR partition is shown in the partition list.
I fire up a server 2012 VM and attach the 3 disks to it - in Storage pools the 2TB disk shows fine, the 3TB disks show a capacity of 512b and 16.0EB of unaloccated space (EB is not a typo!)
now if I look at the disks in Vsphere again, the partition format for the 3TB disks shows as 'unknown' and there are no partitions shown.
checking the disks with gdisk shows that the gpt table has been corrupted.
I have zapped and recreated the partiton tables with gdisk, and checked with gparted that they work. I have also tried the same with partition magic on a windows machine, but same outcome, as soon as the virtual windows machine tries to access them, they corrupt.
If I delete and recreate a blank GPT table and mount the disks on a real win 2012 machine everything works fine, its only breaking when used with the RDM.
I reused the RDM file that I had working fine before, i have also made a new ESXi server amd recreated the RDM files, but still the same outcome.
I did have this working before, so I know that it should all work.