A Raw Device Mapping operates in two compatibility modes, physical and virtual. Here we briefly compare the two:
- Physical compatibility mode is also known as pass-through mode. In this mode a guest operating system directly accesses the hardware. All the SCSI commands except the REPORT LUN command are directly sent to the device. Due to this, certain key features, such as cloning and snapshot features cannot be used. This also implies that standard virtual machine backup methodologies cannot be used to back up the physical RDM hard disk, it would require SAN-based back up methods.
- Virtual compatibility mode allows only the read and write commands to be sent directly to the device and intercepts the rest of the I/O through ...