ESXi and adding hard drives.

[BlueWyvern]

so here's an interesting question that my boss asked today. we went ahead and set up a ESXi server and now he wants to add some storage to it.

we have a 1TB hard drive that has alot of his data on it already and the million dollar question is, do we have to reformat the drive and make a new datastore and put all his data into a vmdk before the Virtual machines can use it, or can it be used just as it sits coming out of his old PC?

[moonlit]

VMWare can use physical drives as virtual ones, so you should be able to map it to a VM and read it as if the VM were native.

[BlueWyvern]

awesome, thanks!

[lopez1364]

I would still recommend formatting it as VMFS datastore because you are using it for permanent storage. Use the vmkfstools command on to format the partition.

[VaKo]

To use a storage unit with ESXi you will need to reformat it to VMFS before ESXi will be able to see it. Also support for SATA storage controllers is limited.

[BlueWyvern]

yeah the little box we are using to run ESXi has (thankfully) a compatible sata controller. And yeah haven't had the time to move the drive over.

Thanks for all your help guys!

[moonlit]

To use a storage unit with ESXi you will need to reformat it to VMFS before ESXi will be able to see it. Also support for SATA storage controllers is limited.

Ahh, that's good to know, all the other VMWare products, though type 2 virtualisers, can access drives as normal, regardless of FS. I should really look at some of that enterprise stuff at some point.