USB is not supported on ESX and as far as I know there are no workarounds to get it to work successfully.

A virtual machine cannot use a USB device - but the Service Console can... I imagine this chap wants to use a USB Device for backup purposes...

When the ESX boots are you getting \[Failed] on the usb-driver... If I remember rightly USB2.0 is not supported under the Service Console (which is based on RedHat Linux 7.2) I don't think the linux kernel has support for USB 2.0...

My Jurassic Dell 1650 PIII servers which do have USB1.0 work fine with my IBM TravelStar Laptop disk in USB Caddy...

In fact, I recently updated one of my admin guides to cover how to do this. Trouble is USB1.0 is really too slow for big virtual disks in a COW format. Works fine for ghost images and ISO file transfers...

This is how I do it

Re: USB External Hard Drive on ESX ServerUsing USB Storage Devices with the Service Console[/b]Note:

• You might want to use a USB Memory Stick or USB Portable Hard-drive in a caddy

• By default USB device drivers are loaded automatically

• This can be disabled by modifying /etc/modules.conf and remarking out with # the line which begins alias usb-controller usb-ohci

• If someone has done this – then you can load the modules (drivers) manually and access the device as needed using the insmod command

• You can read but not write to a NTFS partition on a removable device

• FAT32 is support for read/write

• You might prefer to use EXT3 if you wish to export virtual disks in their monolithic format (on VMFS partition) into a the COW format (copy-on-write) which will take up less physical space on the disk

• However, USB Device Configuration May Cause Error During System Boot

Systems using the USB-UHCI device driver with the USB 2.0 interface cause ESX Server to show a false warning message during the boot sequence. The error looks like this on boot-up

Mar 29 11:04:10 vmserver1 rc.sysinit: Initializing USB controller (usb-uhci): succeeded

Mar 29 11:04:10 vmserver1 modprobe: Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters

Mar 29 11:04:10 vmserver1 modprobe: /lib/modules/2.4.9-vmnix2/kernel/drivers/usb/usb-ohci.o: init_module: No such device

Mar 29 11:04:10 vmserver1 modprobe: /lib/modules/2.4.9-vmnix2/kernel/drivers/usb/usb-ohci.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.9-mnix2/kernel/drivers/usb/usb-ohci.o failed

Mar 29 11:04:10 vmserver1 modprobe: /lib/modules/2.4.9-vmnix2/kernel/drivers/usb/usb-ohci.o: insmod usb-ohci failed

Mar 29 11:04:10 vmserver1 rc.sysinit: Initializing USB controller (usb-ohci): failed

It is safe to ignore this message, but if you want to configure your system so that this warning does not appear the next time you boot your ESX Server machine, follow these steps

Re: USB External Hard Drive on ESX ServerLink[/b]: Answer ID 1659

You might find these other article related to USB and IRQ sharing which you might find interesting

1651 - Using USB Storage Devices on the ESX Server Service Console

1290 - IRQ Sharing May Impact Performance

1326 - Using USB When ESX Server Disables It

If you want to use a USB hard-drive to copy files from the ESX server to it – and you have these errors -then a general work around is to boot to a Knoppix Boot CD and do it that way. Remember if you are copying virtual disks – these will have to be exported to the COW format first.

If you have no errors like me then this how you can go about using USB hard-drives and devices

1. Logon to the Service Console as ROOT

2. \[Optionally] Load up the USB Device Drivers

insmod usbcore

insmod usb-storage

insmod usb-uhci

3. Use the dmesg to print a out a list of active devices and scroll up to locate Initializing USB Mass Storage Driver….

Re: USB External Hard Drive on ESX ServerNote:[/b]

The system assigns a SCSI device ID to the USB device (even though its like to be IDE Laptop Disk if it’s a portable hard-drive). The critical bits are reference to the SDG. This tells me the USB device has been added to the end of all my other SCSI disks (sda, sdb, sdc). This will help me in the next stage which is creating a mount point and mounting the partition on the USB disk.

Adding additional hard-drives to the system can upset this allocation of sd[i]n[/i].

4.Create a mount point with

mkdir /mnt/usb

5. Mount the first partition on the disk with

mount /dev/sdg1 /mnt/usb

Re: USB External Hard Drive on ESX ServerNote:[/b]

If you unsure about the partition scheme on the disk you can use

fdisk –l /dev/sdg to print to the console the partition table

6. List Files and Start using the disk with ls –l /mnt/usb

7. Umount the USB device when finished with

cd /

umount /mnt/usb

Re: USB External Hard Drive on ESX ServerNote:[/b]

Even after unmounting the drive. If I should down the ESX server with the USB Storage attached I get this worrying message – which could be benign

scsi: device set offline – not ready or command retry failed after bus reset : host 2 channel 0 id 0 lun 0

i/o error: dev 08:62, sector 4168

i/o error: dev 08:62, sector 4168

i/o error: dev 08:62, sector 0

For a more readable version try:

url=http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/docs/vmwdocs/Admin-02-ESX2.x.pdfGuide to ESX 2.x Administration II[/url]

pg  69 "Using USB Storage Devices with the Service Console"

Regards

Mike

I have had success using with USB drives to back up .vmdk files, however, the USB drive is attached to a WinTel PC and FTP is used to transfer the file.

I am hesitant to monkey with ESX unless I am very confident with the process.  I have posted a similar question and was discouraged from attempting to do this.