Mount External USB HDD to host and copy all vm's to local datastore

[Piet200]

I have a scripted ESXi installation which works fine, but after the installation is finished I want to copy all VM's from an external HDD to the datastore on the host.

There are no servers/clients attached, so it has to be done from the host itself.

in the /var/log/usb.log file the harddisk is recognized, but how do I access it and copy all VM's from external HDD to the datastore ?

[11satya · Accepted solution]

install vmware tools

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Good luck!

[Piet200]

a little bit more info

[continuum]

you do not want any more info about the vmware-tools as it is completely unrelated to your question

which filesystem do you have on that external USB-drive ?
you may be able to mount it if you you use FAT 16 - AFAIK mounting any other filesystem is not possible ???

I would try to attach the USB-drive to a second machine that then serves its content via NFS

or - attach the USB-drive to a VM and then use FastSCP to copy the VMs to the hosts datastore

[Piet200]

Currenty the external drive contains an NTFS filesystem, but if ext. would be needed I'll use that.

I would like to deploy new (stand-alone) systems from scratch, prefferrable without any attached machines.

I have an unattened ESXi 5 installation on a USB key, after the installation has finished I would like to start a post installation job which copies all VM's from the attached external USB drive to the VMFS volume of the just installes ESXi server.

Would there be a way to realise that ?

[continuum]

the question has been asked a few times - so far I think nobody has a solution