Exposing ESXI VMs to the Network

[Zecht]

I want to use my existing physical machines to permit iSCSI (diskless) boot of virtual machines.  I can run the necessary server/target protocols in the physical and virtual machines, but I need the VMs to be exposed on the network.  How do I do this?

My current setup uses ESXI 5.5, installed on a local drive, with the VM datastores mapped to the same local drive.

[rcporto]

No sure if I understand your needs, but take a look here: iPXE - open source boot firmware [howto:vmware] and  Boot a VM from iSCSI? Yes. We. Can! | vinternals

[Zecht]

Thank you, those links are very helpful.  My specific problem is that ESXI does not have any apparent SMB or NFS share access, and thus since ESXI has taken up the entire disk and "owns" the VMs I have made on it, I can't access those VMs from the network.  To try to clarify, here's the steps I go through:

1. Install ESXI on a DAS SDD.

2. Setup and configure working VMDK virtual machines.

3. Try to share/access the VMDK files from network computers or configure them for diskless boot while referencing the image location

4. Fail.

It would help tremendously if I could make the VMDK files accessible on the network, preferably through CIFS, since it would be able to be easily referenced for iSCSI setup.