Just realised – i havent mentioned anything about how i got around the ESX Storage problem.

I have VMWare Vi3 / ESX 3 Server installed on my S5000XVN Based server using evaluation licenses etc. Anyway, after updating the BIOS (you really do need to update it, its stupidly fussy), i managed to get the installer to recognise the LPT SCSI device and load the correct driver. Once i had VMWare installed, and the licenses created, i thought i could go ahead and create some VM’s and get cracking. Unfortunately -no.

With VMWare ESX, you cannot store VM’s on the hard drive / storage medium that the ESX server is stored on. This meant, in my “Storage devices” section in the VMWare VI Client, it showed no storage options for me to use to store my VM’s on. After looking at the “Add Storage Options..”, my main feasible choices were either an NFS Share, ISCSI SAN, or a LUN. I decided to use my spare server and install FreeNAS- an open source storage solution you can use to create ISCSI, NFS etc storage exports.

Unfortunately, as the “Free” implies, this piece of tosh is based upon FreeBSD – which decided it didnt like my hard drives and wouldnt work. Great stuff. I then looked at my current server, (RHEL 5), and figured out i could create NFS Storage via that! Consolidation in perfection! I added an extra hard drive, mounted it to “/datastore/VM”, and then edited /etc/exports to include the above destination, along with some options about RW access, etc. I then went into the ESX Server using the Vi client, and added “192.168.1.199 /datastore/VM” with my username and password as an NFS store – and voila, it worked!

You can also use this to export current file systems – such as my “software” folder that i use on my NAS, e.g. To make installation of VM’s quicker, i exported “/datastore/private/Software/ISOs” using the same method, so the ESX Server can pull ISO’s directly from the NFS Storage – making everything a lot simpler! Fast forward to the current, and i have around 15 VM’s on the box, all configured and running well Great success.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Techie Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.