Hide Local Storage on an ESX 4.1 Server

[agile1983]

Hi guys,

We have a 10 node ESX server cluster and also 10 local storage drives showing up in the datastores view etc. We have a Vcenter Server machine and it is part of a Windows domain.

Im looking to hide the local storage from view of myself, manager and other systems admin. We are all domain administrators in Windows and as far as i can tell we have full access to everything in Vmware.

My question is how do i hide just the 10 local storage drives from view? I have googled the issue and one article mentions permissions however I tried to follow the instructions but couldnt see the icons it wanted me to click on.

Can anyone help with this, and identify whereabouts in datastores view you go and what permissions to assign to each local storage?

Kind regards

[logiboy123]

I'm not trying to be funny Giza, but I have to ask the question; why would you want to?

If it is so that you have a clear view of what storage is available I would recommend changing the name of the local storage to something like; HOSTNAME_Local. This will make it clear what is SAN attached and what is ESX local. If you want local storage at the bottom of the list you could use Z_HOSTNAME_Local.

Having said all that if you are adamant you want to remove the storage items you can go to the Hosts and Clusters view, select the configuration tab of the ESX host, then click the storage link. Select the local storage item you want to remove and click delete. This will remove the partition from your Host > Inventory > Storage view.

Keep in mind that I find the local store of an ESX box to be quite useful when moving VM's around and or storing ISO's etc. In a large environment with a lot of hosts I prefer to put tools and ISO's on a shared LUN.

Regards,

Paul Kelly

[DSTAVERT]

Moving the post to the ESX 4 forums.

Forum Upgrade Notice - We will be upgrading VMware Communities systems between 10-12 December 2010. During this time, the system will be placed in READ-ONLY mode.

[agile1983]

I think you might have misunderstood what I meant. I dont want to completely delete the local storage as this obviously contains ESX 4.1. What i want to do is hide it from view so we dont have 10 local storage drives appearing along with our other LUNs which are on our SAN.

Can the local storage drives be hidden from view somehow?

thanks a lot

[piaroa]

In short, the local datastores can't be hidden. You could however, use the Inventory > Datastores view, and create a folder for all your local datastores and have it collapsed.

If this post has been helpful/solved your issue, please mark the thread and award points as you see fit. Thanks!

[wcwong]

I agree with the feature request. We generally don't use the local storage, don't want the use the local storage, don't want to have the local storage datastores cluttering up the view. Having it available 'just in case' has some use though maybe we would be better off just deleting those VMFS volumes and create them when we need it.

Perhaps a generalizaton would be a bit to indicate whether or not a datastore is active. If there are no VMs on the datastore (or you want to offline a store), you can mark it as inactive and the views can key off of this attribute.

[DSTAVERT]

I can think of one very simple approach. Start using ESXi on USB flash and pull the local disks entirely. Less heat and power.

Forum Upgrade Notice - We will be upgrading VMware Communities systems between 10-12 December 2010. During this time, the system will be placed in READ-ONLY mode.