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Thread: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

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    Bah Humbug. Dooms's Avatar
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    ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    So I got bored today and stuck ESXi 5.5 on my Microserver (on a USB stick inside the box).

    I formatted my 250GB drive as a main datastore to create my VM's and upload my ISO's but I can't figure out how to mount my 4x 2TB drives and the external 2TB without formatting? Is it possible?

    I currently have FreeNAS & Server 2012 running on the box but the setup isn't useful to me unless I can get them reading those extra drives. Am I missing something?

  2. #2
    Splash
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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Are those disks running as VMFS? How are they provisioned? ESXi can only handle VMFS (or an exported NFS share)

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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    This is where I get out of my depth

    The drives were running as standard NTFS formatted drives within Windows 7 before I stuck ESXi on the MicroServer

  4. #4
    Splash
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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Yep, that's not going to work. You could try mounting them as RDMs (pointer files in the VMFS that you have for your VMs) following the guide here and connect them to an existing VM but I'm almost certain that it's going to require that you format the disks anyway before being able to use them.

    If you're not attached to the data on the disks you can still do the above and present them as raw storage to a VM, but in all honesty I'd recommend an actual RAID controller over trying to do that (I've personally used the HP P410 with reasonable results) - obviously this means spending money

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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Yeah it's more of a ESX to play with machines but keep FreeNAS running for the Pi's around the house. Hmmm may have to rethink this if I'm going to have to format the media drives

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    F.A.S.T. Butuz's Avatar
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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Yep you'll have to format if you want to use 'em as datastores.

    Butuz

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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Hmmm ok. So what about getting data onto the datastores? Is the only way over the network from another computer as you can't do it via a USB drive?

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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    You really only want to keep virtual drives on your datastores (and possibly the occasional ISO). For the most part you won't copy stuff to/from datastores that often.

    You normally create a VM on a datastore and copy data at the VM level.
    Last edited by shaithis; 12-02-2014 at 11:51 AM.
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  9. #9
    Splash
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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    What Shaithis said, really: the only data you want to be keeping on a VMFS volume is the collection of files that make up your VMs, with the possible exception of some ISO files to install from, as well as patches for the host (as it's a single host with no vCenter you won't have VUM to patch your hosts up, so it's esxcli all the way)

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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Quote Originally Posted by shaithis View Post
    For the most part you won't copy stuff to/from datastores that often.

    You normally create a VM on a datastore and copy data at the VM level.
    If the VM is on a datastore, This seems to conflict against the first statement? Could you elaborate? I think I'm not getting the relationship between them.

    I'm interested in ESXi myself but haven't used it yet. Hoping to pick up a HP Microserver and stick FreeNAS and another OS on it to have a play soon.
    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    And by trying to force me to like small pants, they've alienated me.

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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    You cannot share out a datastore. Therefore anything to copy directly to the datastore will only be accessible to VMWare.

    So, you create a virtual disk (which is just a file) on the datastore and that gets presented to a VM as a disk. You then only really save your "data" to the VMs virtual disks and that has to be done via the VMs OS. I.e. if you have a Windows-based file server VM you use a windows share and copy to that.
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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Ok so I'm getting my terminology wrong then?

    I don't want my 2TB drives as a datastore, I just want the contents (media files) to be accessible from the guest VM's.

    At the moment the only Datastore I have in ESXi is a 250GB HDD which has my VM's and a couple ISO's on it. In the same Microsever is another 4x 2TB drives (formatted as NTFS drives) and an extra 2TB drive on USB (also NTFS). If I don't want them as a datastore (as I only want to keep the VMs and ISOs on that) how else can I present them to the guest machines?

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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    The only way to do that is the raw device mapping method that splash linked to. Although it's not something that gets used much and not even sure if it's supported.

    The thing with ESX is that it's supposed to be as lightweight as possible and therefore supporting things like NTFS file systems is not an option and ESX wants to completely control hardware.
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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Hmmm looks like I'll just stick FreeNAS on the Microserver tonight and play with ESXi on a laptop until I understand it a bit more

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    Re: ESXi 5.5 - HDD Datastores / Existing Drives

    Quote Originally Posted by Dooms View Post
    Hmmm looks like I'll just stick FreeNAS on the Microserver tonight and play with ESXi on a laptop until I understand it a bit more
    FreeNAS is strongly reccomended not to be run on a virtual machine in a production environment, if you understand the issues and are happy with them then fire away, but as I understand it even if you did the rdm method linked you'd still have to format the drives in freenas, as that needs them running ZFS.

    One potential option you have is to pull the disks individually and copy the data across to an already running instance whilst connected to another machine. It would need you to consolidate the data so you have an empty drive to start with, but would work.

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