Can I add a physical drive to an ESXi 5.0 Win7 without it being a virtual drive?

[sjkoehler]

Hi all,

I have (2) 2TB sata drives in my system, with a datastore created on each. I added a 1TB drive to the system to use in hopes I can backup files by making it a fully available physical drive to my windows 7 VM. The 1TB disk is completely blank. I can see the drive if I wanted to add it as a datastore, so I know the ESXi system sees it. Is there an option to not carve out a virtual machine and instead make the raw drive available to the Win7 VM?  If it's of any difference, my goal is to back up disks off the Win7 onto the physical drive for backup purposes, and I'd like to be able to access the raw data off the drive in case of a failure instead of trying to get into a virtual hard disk file. When I go to add a drive to the VM, it only gives me the option of a new or existing virtual disk.

Thanks in advance for any help....

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

A raw device mapping (RDM) is intended for use with SAN storage, but you can make it work with local storage as well (it would be unsupported).  - http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php.

[sjkoehler]

Dave Mishchenko wrote:

A raw device mapping (RDM) is intended for use with SAN storage, but you can make it work with local storage as well (it would be unsupported).  - http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php.

This worked perfect! Thanks much1