In Xsan Admin you can easily label LUNs that are available on your Fibre Channel fabric. Using the cvlabel command, you can also easily label a LUN that isn’t on a Fibre Channel fabric. Labeling a LUN writes data to the LUN, thus allowing Xsan to somewhat mark its territory (insert vivid imagery of an Xsan shaped like a dog taking a whiz on a poor thumb drive). If you then look at that LUN from a Mac OS X system without Xsan installed, the computer will have greyed out options in Disk Utility and will not be able to treat the LUN as a “disk.” You also can’t use diskutil to reformat it.
As much as we love our RAIDs, at times they will be ready to put out to pasture (more vivid imagery, this time of a RAID chassis grazing gleefully in the sunshine). This is where cvlabel comes in again (retiring the LUN, not the imagery). The cvlabel command can be used to unlabel a LUN and move it back to what amounts to free space. If you run cvlabel with a -l option you will see a list of LUNs:
cvlabel -l
If you want to unlabel a LUN, first remove it from your SAN. That typically involves something akin to backing up the volume and restoring it following a rebuild or using snfsdefrag to migrate all data off it and then removing it from the volume), typically with the volume stopped. Once the LUN has been removed, find the LUN in the list provided using that -l option and then run the following command (replacing MyLUN with the name of your LUN):
cvlabel -v -u MyLUN
Make sure that you’re using the name of the LUN when you run this and not the name of the volume, or the name of the wrong LUN. Also make sure that the LUN is no longer a member of an Xsan (or StorNext SAN), etc. Once you have unlabeled the LUN, fire up Disk Utility and you should be ready to format the new drive. Seems like this ends up getting done via ssh a lot, which doesn’t have Disk Utility, so to do so with diskutil, run:
diskutil list
Then with the output find the unformated space, which will likely say something akin to disk1 or disk2. You won’t usually find that an empty LUN will have slices like disk0s1, disk0s2, etc. Once you locate it in the list, you can then run (assuming the disk from the output of the previous command was disk1 and the name you want the volume to have is MyVolume):
diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ MyVolume disk1
Note: You must install Xsan to get cvlabel.