Adding Physical Drive

[jbo5112]

I have a hard drive that has Linux installed on it, and it's plugged in to my ESXi server, where it was originally installed. VMware server 2.0 let me add the physical drive to a virtual machine as a generic scsi device and 1.0 let me just add it as a disk. Is there anyway to do this in ESXi, or do I have to format the drive with vmfs, create a virtual disk that spans the entire physical disk and copy the OS onto it? The second option sounds like it would add unnecessary overhead, and a lot of extra work for me.

[DSTAVERT]

I don't know whether it is still possible to do RDM to a local disk anymore. I do think that you would be further ahead if you used the Standalone converter to create a VM from the disk and then added the drive to your datastore.

[jbo5112]

I found it in the documentation (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_esxi_server_config.pdf). It looks like the SCSI card has to be properly configured first, then if the physical adapter is supported for this, you can select Raw Device Mappings for a virtual disk. However, the ICH10 on my system isn't supported for Raw Device Mappings.

It looks like I'll have to add a copy of the disk to another machine and run the standalone converter, unless the conversion can be run within ESXi 4.1. I'd like to avoid juggling hard drives.

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

RDM was never a supported option for local disks.

I would go with your suggestion and add the drive to another machine and run converter. You can resize the volume during conversion.

[a_p_]

If your host is not meant for production, you don't care about support and you are willing to experiment, then take a look at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014513

André

[DSTAVERT]

There are other references in the 3.5 forums but I was sure I saw somewhere that it didn't work in 4 anymore. If you are successful let us know.

[jbo5112]

The instructions are for 3.5. It tells me to load a config file "/etc/vmware/hostd/vmconfig.xml", which doesn't exist anywhere on the file system and the whole "" section is missing from my config. Even without trying it, I have to agree that it won't work, at least not without a lot more work.

I have the drive I need replicated to another hard drive, and am closing down all the things I have open on my workstation for a rare reboot (I'm also a C++ dev, DBA and network admin, sometimes all at once). I'll just add the disk to my workstation and use VMware converter. Thanks for all the help everyone!

[jbo5112]

I was wrong. It is possible. Just before starting the converter, I found the necessary instructions for vmkfstools here: http://vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php.

It's not point and click, but everything worked. It gave me a disk that is a raw mapped lun that I can add to the virtual machine. The only small problem is that it has a different disk-id, which SUSE's poorly configured grub didn't like, but that was a fairly simple fix.