I apologize for the delay but the forum never notified me of another post and I've been trying to find some time to test this.
I just installed 3.5.0u4-153875 and it recognized the HDD with AHCI enabled (this is a plus for the new version) however I don't see a storage controller for USB or FireWire (IEEE-1394). I believe this would be the key to utilizing storage on USB or FireWire. I did see 3 HBAs on the AHCI controller but only the one target (SATA HDD). The optical (DVD or CD) drive is still inaccessible from ESXi.
I think that if you wanted to utilize USB or FireWire you'd have to utilize a hosted VM system, like VMware Server or VMware Workstation. iSCSI would be the primary external storage for this system unless you're using a D/Dock with a Fibre Channel (FC) card (assuming there exists an FC card that can fit in the D/Dock by length, PCI slot and heat) or if there exists a device that takes the CardBus (CB) port to an external enclosure for a PCI card (which I'd doubt exists) or if there exists a CB card providing a storage adapter compatible with one that is supported.
You could use another laptop using Linux, an iSCSI target daemon and FireWire to attach from ESXi through iSCSI to a FireWire storage device. iSCSI would be theoretically faster (1000 Mbps versus 400 Mbps) but sucks up CPU in TCP and iSCSI calculations (including checksums).
Another thing to consider is that this laptop has a cardbus slot and there are gigabit cardbus adapters but they may or may not be supported by ESXi. This would allow a separate backend (host: Management, storage, VMotion) and frontend (VM) network Unfortunately, I don't have one so I can't test their compatibility.
EDIT1: Also check out:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/180728
Message was edited by: grcumm
