Trouble creating an export storage domain

Hello,

I am trying to create an export storage domain so that I can import VMs from our production VMware system for testing.

I have spent half the day on this doing what I think needs to be done, but I am having a LOT of trouble for sure...

So I have one of my hypervisor hosts - I have 4 Dell 2950s in my lab that I am testing this on. One of them has 3 extra disks in it configured in RAID 5 (hardware RAID). I would like to use them for the export storage domain. I identified the disk, lsscsi VERY useful.

Then I created a partition on the disk with fdisk, and set set the type to 83. Wrote the changes fine. This is where things begin to come unglued.

I then tried to make an ext3 FS on it. I can't it keeps saying it is busy and everything I see on google points to it being part of a software raid... It's NOT. Never has been ... it used to be windoze FS on there, NTFS. Guess I will try and lowlevel format it using the RAID controller next.

I did manage to partition it and put an EXT2 FS on it with parted. But then I realised that I the mount point I had created was gone, as the hypervisor nodes are not persistent. So I can persist the mount point I guess, but then trying to mount it - I can't as it says it is already mounted! Just going around in circles.

So basically I thought with this extra space not doing anything and doesn't need to be shared that I could put the NFS EWXPORT system there, but it seems like there are so many obstacles that I am starting to wonder if I am doing it the right way? Am I, or is it stupid to try and put this on the hypervisor... I guess I could try and put it on the RHEVM system, but that isn't very big and I may have some big VM to import and when I tried to create an export storage domain, it has the hosts there, so I assumed, and now I am not sure/.

Thanks
Bill