Advice on central storage location for Virtual Machines

I have a server with 4 Sata HDD and I need to use 1 SATA drive as a storage location that can be accessed by all the VM running on the server.

I need advice on how I can achieve this because I will be using the storage to place things like ISO and other softwares that I might need to run on the VMs.

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QHalo

Just create a folder on the hard drive you want to use and share it out. Map to it using \\<server-name>\<share-name>.

mishy

I am running my Esxi as a dedicated host on a USB where all the 4 SATA drives are. So I am not really sure I will be able to import the other HDD that I intend to use onto a VM which will share the Disk.

QHalo

Unless the controller that the hard drives are attached to can be seen by ESXi, it won't work.

jibbajabba

Create a vm with a disk the size of the one SATA drive. Depending on what OS your VMs are install Linux and create an NFS or Samba shares or install Windows and create normal shares.

Or simply create a datastore, upload your ISOs there and mount them inside the VM. For non ISO software simply download one of the 100s free softwares to create an ISO and create one with your software. Then again simply mount inside the VM.

QHalo

None of that will work if ESXi can't see the disks though. Its all dependent on his controller. There's not enough information to make a determination if it will or won't. He didn't specify much about his hardware.

mishy

My current controller is an Integrated 4 port SATA RAID and ESXi detects the HDDs. I am not using the RAID at the moment. Currently I think I might have to go for the solution of creating a VM on the HDD that I need to use and then use SAMBA or NFS.

dave330i

Another option is to SW iSCSI using Openfiler.

blargoe

If you're just using it to store iso files, you can just store those on the VMFS and mount them to the VM using the vsphere client.

mishy

blargoe wrote: »

If you're just using it to store iso files, you can just store those on the VMFS and mount them to the VM using the vsphere client.

I think I will use that method for the ISO and use Openfiler for the central storage location.