I found the problem...
with the cockpit deploy, all disks are blacklisted from multipath by a script called
blacklist_all_disks.sh
This does not happen when a host is added manually. To work around the problem edit
/etc/multipath.conf add the second line to the file below... this makes sure that vdsm
will not ever mondify this file again.
VDSM REVISION 1.5
# VDSM PRIVATE
then add the following to the end of the file
blacklist {
devnode "*"
}
this blacklists all disk from multipath.
Had to dig fairly deep for this, but now its working.