A Raw Disk Mapping (RDM) can be used to present a LUN directly to a virtual machine from a SAN. Rather than creating a virtual disk (VMDK) on a LUN, which is generally shared with other VMs and virtual disks.
The reasons for doing this should purley be for functional and management reasons, NOT performance. There is a mis-understanding that RDMs offer greater performance compared to VMDK's on a VMFS datastore. I've seen lots of vSphere environments that have gone over kill on RDMs for SQL servers and the like for "performance reasons", its difficult to manage! If your looking for improved storage performance look into the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adaptor.
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