VMware ESXI mounting drives

PWR_USR · 13 Nov 2015 at 21:57

Hey yall,

I've just set up a vmware ESXI server as a home lab style setup. i have a couple of windows virtual machines set up now (windows server 2012, windows 7).
i have a couple of hard drives full of old movies and general storage that i want to mount to the windows virtual machine so i can share it across my network, however i cant find any way of doing this without formatting the drives to turn them into vmdk devices.
is this possible? am i missing something?

Thanks

Mr-White · 13 Nov 2015 at 22:08

Any disks you put in the server will need to be formated to VMFS before ESXi can use them as a datastore.

MW

PWR_USR · 13 Nov 2015 at 22:27

so is there a good way to import around 2TB of movies, general storage etc?

Mr-White · 13 Nov 2015 at 22:44

Transfer the data as you would normally do at a Windows level

MW

PWR_USR · 13 Nov 2015 at 23:28

so ESXI cant access a drive that already has data on it?
seems like they missed something there :/

Little_Crow · 14 Nov 2015 at 00:31

Well if you put the drive in the ESXI machine you can mount it as a Raw Device Map.
You lose some of the benefits of VMDK's, but if it's a home lab they aren't likely to matter.

ecksmen · 14 Nov 2015 at 16:47

PWR_USR said:
so ESXI cant access a drive that already has data on it?
seems like they missed something there :/

Not really; generally speaking ESXi was built to be clustered; VMs are designed to be portable (DRS). Binding a VM to a physical device (such as a pre-formatted volume) prevents easy migration such as vmotion / cold-migration and IMO should be avoided when ever possible (being lazy isn't a good reason).

ASE001 · 14 Nov 2015 at 21:09

Depending on the motherboard you can pass through the HDDs directly to the VM, but it isn't easy and need a bit of know how, plus google.

Take a look at these links.

http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1025
http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php44

Hope this helps

Bluecube · 14 Nov 2015 at 21:14

As has been mentioned a Raw Cevice Map is the way to go. I used RDMs to pass through four disks to my XPenology VM so I know it works.

quickshot89 · 14 Nov 2015 at 21:33

If you have them in a usb caddy you can attach a usb device. Doesnt give the greatest perforamce but I found it was fine when running a plex server before I got my gen8

Frozennova · 16 Nov 2015 at 20:34

Rdm will achieve what you want
http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/

matja · 17 Nov 2015 at 08:23

Is there no console command for it? In QEMU one can do "pci_add auto storage file=/dev/disk,format=raw,if=virtio" to hot-add a raw disk on a running VM, I'd imagine VMware has something similar considering its 'enterprise'.

PWR_USR · 17 Nov 2015 at 11:38

ecksmen said:
Not really; generally speaking ESXi was built to be clustered; VMs are designed to be portable (DRS). Binding a VM to a physical device (such as a pre-formatted volume) prevents easy migration such as vmotion / cold-migration and IMO should be avoided when ever possible (being lazy isn't a good reason).

makes sense when you put it like that, i just thought there would be a way to convert a disk to a virtual disk without having to format and lose data.
create a virtual store using a folder, or something along those lines

however i have now taken the plunge and copied the data over the network into a new VMDK.

i did try to go down the RDM rout but the option was grayed out, possibly the drive or controller isnt compatable.

Frozennova · 17 Nov 2015 at 11:42

PWR_USR said:
makes sense when you put it like that, i just thought there would be a way to convert a disk to a virtual disk without having to format and lose data.
create a virtual store using a folder, or something along those lines

however i have now taken the plunge and copied the data over the network into a new VMDK.

i did try to go down the RDM rout but the option was grayed out, possibly the drive or controller isnt compatable.

Try the guide I posted above, always worked for me regardless of hardware

matja said:
Is there no console command for it? In QEMU one can do "pci_add auto storage file=/dev/disk,format=raw,if=virtio" to hot-add a raw disk on a running VM, I'd imagine VMware has something similar considering its 'enterprise'.

Mapping physical drives to virtualised guests is bad practice in an enterprise environment. You want the data on a SAN or at the very least a NAS so you can run multiple hosts to utilise the High availability features VMware offer

Little_Crow · 17 Nov 2015 at 12:15

It's a moot point as you've gone the copying route, but you can totally convert an RDM to VMDK.
I've had the need to do it, and it does work. However, you need to have a licensed version of ESXi with Storage vMotion to do it.

The free version of ESXi is excellent for a single box home/SMB setup, but there are a lot of features that licensing is required for. Most likely you'll never need them, and even if you do the licensing cost will make free alternatives a better choice, though it might take a bit more effort.

(The other alternative would have been using vSphere converter, but I'm not convinced that would have been a better solution than just copying the data as you've already done)

PWR_USR · 17 Nov 2015 at 12:58

OK so it is possible just not on the free licence.
i'm still learning a lot about the different vmware products and what each package has to offer.

the home lab setup is just so i can learn more about virtualisation on a larger (business) scale.

Mr-White · 17 Nov 2015 at 14:08

You could use the VMware converter to convert the physical disk into a vmdk and upload it to your datastore

MW

ecksmen · 18 Nov 2015 at 19:18

PWR_USR said:
OK so it is possible just not on the free licence.
i'm still learning a lot about the different vmware products and what each package has to offer.

the home lab setup is just so i can learn more about virtualisation on a larger (business) scale.

I don't think it's possible these days for a single person to fully understand what VMware has to offer in its entire product suite; they have so many products these days of differing nature that the traditional vm layer is just the tip of the ice burg (vSphere). I would suggest that you pick a product and not get too bogged down with the rest of the offerings and then branch out into what floats your boat the most.

I started with ESX 3.5, then into ESXi in single site clusters, moved into metro clustering and traditional DR with SRM and now my focus is on Horizon DaaS (formally Desktone) with a tiny bit of vCAC / vRealise Automation but I'm lucky that I work for a service provider and get access to the VMware Partner stuff.