After a FEW hours of nail biting, I GOT ISCSI working, but ...

[mikemcsw]

I set up ISCSI for the main purpose of being able to easily file share between windows and esxi, but I got it working (using a cheap iomega storcenter NAS), but now how do i see the iscsi folders from windows???

[mikemcsw]

I configured iscsi initiator in control panel on vista, and it shows connected, and I can even see it in disk management, but how do i access the folders from windows?

[Rubeck]

You can't....

Windows dosn't know anything about VMFS filesystems... and presenting an active VMFS volume to Windows is a bad idea due to VMFS locking mechanisms.,,

/Rubeck

[J1mbo · Accepted solution]

NFS is proibably what you need. Configure services for unix on your Windows server, create a share and add that to ESX. Then you have a folder on the Windows box that both can see.

HTH

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

Please award points to any useful answer.

[mikemcsw]

How do i award you each your 6 points?

ANyway, thanks for the info. A couple more questions.

1. whether nfs or iscsi will they have the same performance if they come from the same NAS hardware?

2. can i format the iscsi in windows as ntfs and then present it to datastore (or can vms ONLY reside on vmfs)?

3. If i present as nfs, will it then appear as vmfs and i can still see it on windows?

4. what do most people do (non production environment) that want to have freedom of copying vms around between esx and windows?

5. would there be any use of iscsi over the internal sata drive if you cant use it in windows anyway? Why do some people use iscsi instead of just installing a bigger sata drive?

THe main purpose I bought the NAS was to be able to share easily between windows and ESX, so i guess what I want to do is configure it as NFS?