Hi All,
I'm fairly new to Virtualization in general (I'm learning!) and have a question. I have a VMware ESXi 5.0 host server set up with various VMs configured within it. I also have various data stores configured, typically one VM per data store. Most of the VMs are Windows, but the one I am having issues with is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 64-bit VM. I am currently managing/administering the host server remotely, over a pretty slow connection. Anticipating this, the last time I was on the same network as the host server, I uploaded, into a folder on the same data store as the RHEL VM, about 5GB worth of files that I knew I would need to access in the RHEL VM to install various software. Now, I am trying to "expose" those very files to the RHEL VM so I can install the software. How would I do that?
From what I've gathered reading other posts on here, I could create an ISO containing the files and then upload that to the host server for mounting in the CD drive, but my connection is so slow that would take a very long time. I also gather that I could create a network share on my Windows 7 machine and allow the VM to access files that way - but again, my connection is the problem (not to mention I don't have a GUI installed on RHEL and I'm by no means a Linux expert).
None of the files I need are ISOs, unfortunately, so I can't directly mount them from the data store to the VM's CD drive. Though I have shell access to the host server, it doesn't recognize the vmware-mount command so I can't access the virtual disk for RHEL to just copy the files into it. It also doesn't recognize the mkisofs command (which I Googled when trying to figure out if I could create the ISO on the host itself).
So, basically, I'm looking for a way to access files from within a VM that are on the same data store as its virtual disk is. Whether that can be achieved by copying those files into the virtual disk somehow, or mounting a CD drive or hard drive that exposes those files to the VM, I don't have a preference... I'm just trying to avoid having to re-upload the files in a different format (or using a different method) since they are already on the host server.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated - thank you.
