VMWare vSphere 5 help needed

[Roger.Wilco]

I currently have vSphere 5 with a couple of VM's running on a HP MicroServer. I want to add more drives with media on, that I want to share on the network, so that my other pc and HTPC can access it. What are my options?

Do you get something like FreeNAS where you can just add drives and share over the network, without loosing the data, and without having to setup raid?

Or is it possible to add a whole drive to a VM in vSphere, so that I can enable sharing on the VM then?

 

[stricken]

its possible to add a whole drive to a VM. but personally, i would do that separate and share those drives from the host OS (as NFS shares), and mount whatever i need when i need it.

NFS can be mounted by Win, Linux, and everything else.

 

[Roger.Wilco]

its possible to add a whole drive to a VM. but personally, i would do that separate and share those drives from the host OS (as NFS shares), and mount whatever i need when i need it.

NFS can be mounted by Win, Linux, and everything else.

Thanks, sounds like a good option... lemme go google how to do that...

 

[Roger.Wilco]

its possible to add a whole drive to a VM. but personally, i would do that separate and share those drives from the host OS (as NFS shares), and mount whatever i need when i need it.

NFS can be mounted by Win, Linux, and everything else.

I can't seem to find a guide on how to do this, can you maybe help?

And just so that we're on the same page, you're saying that I can share the drives as it is now, without losing any data?

 

[ShawnStar]

its possible to add a whole drive to a VM. but personally, i would do that separate and share those drives from the host OS (as NFS shares), and mount whatever i need when i need it.

NFS can be mounted by Win, Linux, and everything else.

old post but

I thought it worked like this:

You create your hard drives for your servers in VMWare from scratch and that vmdk file goes on a datastore... datastore is a logical container on the physical disk.... so your new drive will have zip on it as you usually have to format the LUN (Your drive) before you can actually create the datastore...
Or does VSphere 5 work differently? Or is there another way to do it? Would be nice if one could, did this work? One could attach it as a external usb drive and assign it to a vm server/pc then share it...

 

[iDOL]

I can't seem to find a guide on how to do this, can you maybe help?

And just so that we're on the same page, you're saying that I can share the drives as it is now, without losing any data?

take a read through here : Found some extra reading material on the subject : http://blackundertone.wordpress.com/tag/rdm/

http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/

I used this to get : http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...-MicroServer?p=6870726&viewfull=1#post6870726

 

[ShawnStar]

A nice, thanks