ESXi6.5 Running on Dell R730 server

[kurianlinu]

Hi Team,
I have Xeon 64gb RAM Dell R730 6TB HDD server in my production environment. ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-standard (VMware, Inc.) hosted into it and few VMs created under the ESXi. Now I need to transfer few files(backup file of a vm) from the ESXi to an external USB/Optical drive. Since this is a linux based environment(VMkernel 6.5.0),Could you please direct me how to mount a USB disk into the ESXi to copy 3.7Tb of files fromESXi to USB.
Do we need to stop the usbarbitrator service to display the USB disk under "/dev/disks/"
/etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop
Is there any challenges here, do we need to change the file format(Flat32/ntfs)
ManyThanks,
Linu

[kurianlinu]

1.How to use a usb disk of size 4TB or more mount to ESXi as data store .I got few information on usb disk size less than 2TB. Please help.

2. Also once I copied the required files from ESXi I will unmount the usb disk(vmfs), then how can I mount the same usb disk in sometime later?

ManyThanks,

Linu

[a_p_]

USB drives are not supported as VMFS datastores, although it may work for drives <=2TB.
What may be an option is to copy the VM's files via scp (e.g. WinSCP) to an external USB disk mounted to a Windows system.

André

[kurianlinu]

Hi All,
Thanks for the support.
FYI,
I have added a 4TB USB disk as datastore into the ESXi6.5 using the similar method for adding <=2TB.

Thanks,
Linu