Hot added LSI Logic Parallel SCSI controller and disk not recognized in Linux

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information about rescan requirements after hot-add/hot-remove of a virtual disk to an LSI Logic Parallel controller in Linux virtual machine

Symptoms:

• After hot adding an LSI Logic Parallel controller to a Linux VM using Edit Settings, and hot add a hard disk attached to this controller.
• The newly added hard disk is not recognized by running the Linux command "fdisk -l | grep dev"  or "lsblk".
• This issue is observed on Linux Distros including Oracle Linux 7.6 & 8.0 and Debian 9.6.0 & 9.11.0 & 10.0.0, when running on vSphere 6.x and 7.0.
• Hot removal of LSI Logic Parallel controller fails to be recognized (vSphere 6.7 only)

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7

Cause

This issue is caused by a limitation in Linux kernel.

Resolution

To resolve this situation in a running Linux VM, you must rescan the disks to recognize.

To rescan the hard disk, use these commands:

for i in `find /sys/ -iname rescan`;do echo 1 >$i; done;
for i in `find /sys/ -iname scan`;do echo "- - -" >$i; done;