VmWare Datastore migration

dhay13

Hello folks. Looking to expand my home network out a little and have a PowerEdge 2950 with 2 1TB HDs. I just ordered and received some more drive caddys and want to move my ESXi installation to a 250GB HD and keep my datastore that is on my 1TB drive (same drive my original EXSi is installed. I don't have alot set up in here so starting from scratch isn't the end of the world but is there an easy way to re-create my ESXi onto a 250GB drive? I can leave my datastore on the same 1 TB drive but would (or could) delete my ESXi installation off of that drive.

Current setup: Drivebay 1: 1TB drive with ESXi and datastore

Basically my configuration would be Drivebay 1: 250GB ESXi, Drivebay 2: mirrored 250GB drive, Drives 3, 4, 5, and 6 some type of Raid configuration for my datastore(s).

I don't have vCenter, or any other tools as I am using ESXi 6.5 free version and only 1 single physical server

MariusRZR

I don't think you can move the ESXi to another disk and leaving the original datastore intact. I never tried this though, so I may be wrong.

dhay13

Thanks. Yesterday I pulled my drives and inserted blank disks to test a new install but couldn't get ESXi to recognize the disks so I re-inserted the old disks to re-visit it later and they were no longer recognized? Like I sais, not a big deal to re-create my environment since it was mainly test stuff and not much there but now I can't get ESXi to recognize any of my physical disks? The current install is 6.5 installed on a USB flash drive. Also, I can't log into my Dell OpenManage console anymore? It was late and I gave up so maybe I was just too tired to think straight but I will play around again today.