Host Machine - SATA Drives Clarification

[Killerdraft]

    Afternoon, wanted to confirm this.

I have a machine I am repurposing to a esxi host machine. I bought a new ssd, and installed esxi 6.7 on it.

I have about 10 drives also physically installed on the same box, with data on them.

From what I am reading, I am not able to add those drives without losing data?

Or do I have read this wrong?

Thanks

[daphnissov]

Essentially that's correct. You probably need to do some reading up on hypervisors in general and ESXi specifically. They don't work like a regular old Windows/Linux desktop, and nor should you try to make them become one. Drives (preferably not individual internal ones that aren't protected by RAID) only exist as a vehicle to store virtual machine files. They don't get mapped directly to VMs.