usb external hard drive with esxi 4.01

[Skidog]

I have a couple of of esxi boxes with ha and drs enabled. I also have a physical machine that one of my virtual machines backs up some databases to. Does anybody know if esxi supports usb external hard drives? I would like to retire the physical server and plug the usb drive into the esxi host.

[pgmunzi]

i have 2 server esxi 3.5 that share the same external hard disk. I use NFS to share the root directory on the external hard disk.

[sky-knight]

ESXi will recognize the USB drive on the USB bus. But, it takes some manual hackery to get it to format it. It must be formatted with ESXi's vmfs before you can use it.

[Skidog]

I don't want to store machines on it. I want the other Windows servers to be able to access it. Mostly I use it to backup databases. I have a nas for the vms. Will the vms see it as a normal drive like I plugged it into a physical box?

[sky-knight]

No

[Solignis]

ESXi will recognize the USB drive on the USB bus. But, it takes some manual hackery to get it to format it. It must be formatted with ESXi's vmfs before you can use it.

For a while I used a USB HDD to run the ESXi system core off of. No hack required for version 4 not sure about any other version.

Sky-Knight is right though about the using the USB HDD like a "share" if it is plugged into the VMWare Box it is not going to be much of anything unless first of all shared, second of all provisioned to a virtual appliance.

Sounds like what you need is something like openfilerit is an open source NAS appliance that is pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. But it will run out of VMWare. Maybe that could be a start for you?

[Skidog]

I suppose I could get another nas and use nfs to map the drive.

[Solignis]

That is one option you could do.

The reason I recommend openfiler is because it kinda like Untangle. If you have a spare PC laying around that is in good shape and the hardware is supported you can make it in to an openfiler NAS.

[sky-knight]

Yeah... too bad the software RAID in openfiler sucks monkey balls... I have an old server here... dual power supply, dual P3 Xeon, 5 136gb SCSI 320 drives in it... but the RAID card is one of Adaptec's wonderfully useless "host raid" cards. Every time I try and get linux raid and LVM working it simply crashes.

[Solignis]

I would not know how good openfiler raid is, I use 2 HP smart array 6402 hardware RAID controllers.