fix disk device names

Hello, I'm running some VM on VMware ESX 4.1 with RHEL 5.6 64bit. So far i extended some LV by adding some disks to their VG. So far so good. Now i would like to consolidate some smaler disk into a big one. Afterwards all the smaller ones will be removed.

As I know so far the name schema for disk devices is according to their place (1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... disk device => /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, ...).

As my VM instance is able to have some scsi controllers i would like to use one for each VG. This would make the disk management much easier to identify the right disk in VMware and on the RHEL system in case i need to change (delete) one.

Unfortunateely I'm afraid that as soon as i remove one disk device the later onces will get a new device name and replace the earlier deleted one. Is there a trick available to use fixed device names i can use with LVM and the system to ensure any deletion and addition of disks in between the line will not result in a different name for already used disk devices ?

So far i know other unix systems, i.e. HP-UX are able to manage it. I hope linux is as well able to do so.

Thanks a lot for any helpfull information

Holger