I was testing Beta 3 using VMware IO Analyzer and decided to test disk bridging on a Samsung 840 Pro series (512 GB) model. To create the disk bridge I performed the following steps:
1) Open Computer Manager to determine the disk ID.
2) Open a command prompt and run DiskPart with the following commands:
a) Select disk=1
b) Clean
c) Exit
3) In Computer manager I selected the disk and took it offline.
4) Opened the Starwind Management Console and:
a) Add Device (Advanced)
b) Had disk Drive
c) Physical Disk
d) Selected the physical disk, selected the asynchronous flag, and clicked the Next button
e) Selected Write-Back with 4096 cache. Clicked Next.
f) Created a new target, specified SSD01 for name, and accepted defaults for target. Enabled asynchronous mode. Clicked Next.
g) Clciked Create.
5) Added target to my ESXi access rule.
6) Open the VMware vSphere Client and selected the iSCSI storage adapter and rescan the adapter.
7) Select the ATA (disk bridged) device and right click it to change the path to Round Robin (I have 4 NIC/paths).
For the fist VMware IO Accelerator VM I edited the settings to create the second disk as follows:
1) Click the Add button.
2) Select Hard disk click Next.
3) Select Create new disk click Next.
4) Change disk size to 100 GB, Thick Provision Eager Zero, Specify a datastore or datastore cluster and click Browse.
5) Selected the bridged disk. Click Next
6) Select Independent and Persistent. Click Next.
7) Click Finish.
Click OK.About 12-13 percent complete the process fails with the message: A general system error occurred: Input/output error. After which the VMware datastore also disappears even though the device is still listed under the iSCSI adapter. I was able to duplicate this issue with a clean boot and have attached the log file.
BTW: Using an image file on the same SDD is working without issue.
