xenserver xe sr-create error The SR operation cannot be performed because a device underlying the SR is in use by the host

This error looks to me to come mainly from the xenserver SR database.

If entering command like

xe sr-create shared=true device-config:device="/dev/drbd1" name-label="DRBD-SR1" type=lvm

exits and returns

The SR operation cannot be performed because a device underlying the SR is in use by the host.

you'd better verify that drbd1 is not already part of the xenserver SR database and if the case, remove it (obviously if you really deleted it in your drbd experimentations)

That is the clean solution... otherwise I'm quite sure (not tested) that choosing a different device name, would work like a charm but this would make not much sense.

Please note that playing with drbd may result in such situation where you already used any drbd resource name to provide some SR to xenserver and next, you forget it...

Robert

XenServer 5.6 How To Configure NICs and dedicate one to DRBD use

How to configure the tcp/ip in XenServer 5.6 NICs and eventually dedicate one NIC to be used for storage only.
How to configure xenserver 5.6 NICs for use with drbd

I've found one nice paragraph on the Citrix XenServer ® 5.6 Administrator's Guide :
It's title is Configuring a dedicated storage NIC .

How to configure network interface card ip address, netmask, gateway, dns and so on in XenServer 5.6, is found in the XenServer 5.6 CLI xe command reference under the item pif-reconfigure-ip .

Configuring NICs in XenServer 5.6 examples are shown in the links above.

If these tips saved you some time (I've lost a lot searching them), please drop a comment.

I.C.