can I use a VMFS volume on the USB-boot stick as datastore ?

[continuum]

can I use a VMFS volume on the USB-boot stick as datastore ?

I know that this would perform horrible - but is it possible ?
I already created a VMFS-volume on the stick but I see no way to use it ...
any ideas ?

[sbeaver]

How much space do you have on the stick?

[continuum]

500 Mb or more - currently I try using a 3Gb VMFS-volume

creating the volume itself is no problem - I attach the stick as a physical disk to a WS-VM so it is regarded as a regular scsi-disk

[EddieA]

Don't forget about the write/erase cycle limitations.  You could end up with a dead stick fairly quickly, depending on what you actually store on it.

Cheers.

[VeyronMick]

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

You'll lose 2GB for metadata so it would need to be a realtively large USB stick to make it worth while.

[admin]

VMFS does not support USB devices but you can have other option to create datastore through nfs mount.

[continuum]

do you say that I can use the esxi itself to act as a NFS-server ?

[justinfielding]

This is an interesting topic.  I have a HP microserver and want to run ESXi 5 from a 4GB USB stick plugged in to the motherboard.  Currently faced with to issues:

1. ESXi 5 doesn't seem to be able to use my 3ware 9650SE based RAID volume due to lack of drivers.  Crazy they didn't include 3ware support out of the box as these RAID cards are everywhere.
2. Apparently even once 3ware drivers are released I won't be able to present a single volume greater than 2TB to the fileserver VM.

For problem 1 there doesn't seem to be any solution other than to wait for drivers and perhaps run with 4.1 for now and upgrade later.

Looking at problem 2 there could be a solution but I'm not sure how to achieve it.  I'm thinking that I could use an Openfiler VM to present a 6TB NFS volume which can be accessed directly by the fileserver and/or workstaitions.  Also use it to present a 2TB NFS volume to ESXi for running VMs.

This raises a couple of questions:

1. Is it possible to use the space left on the USB stick after ESXi installation to run the Openfiler VM?
2. If so - what are the issues with running the VM from this USB stick, I know the write/erase cycles are a concern but can this be mitigated by giving the Openfiler VM plenty of RAM and sending logs to a syslog server etc.  Also if the stick dies and takes Openfiler with it am I at risk of losing my data stored on the NFS volumes or will a new Openfiler install with restored configuration get me going again?  Also will performance of the NFS shares be poor due to Openfiler system disk being slow?
3. Can I pass the 3ware RAID card straight through to the Openfiler VM so that it accesses it directly?  If so do I pass the entire card or can I do it on a LUN/LUN basis?  If the latter I could present the 2TB volume directly to VMware and the 6TB volume to Openfiler.

Hope you don't mind me asking these questions here, I don't want to hijack the thread but these seem to link closely to the original posters question so I though it may be best not to duplicate questions in a new thread.  If it's too OT from the original post I'll open up a new one.

[continuum]

I want to do almost the same.

At the moment I think our best option so far is to add a remote NFS-share to ESXi

All other ideas I looked into like using a VM that boots from one of the tools-iso or using a PXE-bootable VM are stopped short when I am looking fora way to store the vmx-file.

[wdroush1]

justinfielding wrote:

This is an interesting topic.  I have a HP microserver and want to run ESXi 5 from a 4GB USB stick plugged in to the motherboard.  Currently faced with to issues:

1. ESXi 5 doesn't seem to be able to use my 3ware 9650SE based RAID volume due to lack of drivers.  Crazy they didn't include 3ware support out of the box as these RAID cards are everywhere.
2. Apparently even once 3ware drivers are released I won't be able to present a single volume greater than 2TB to the fileserver VM.

For problem 1 there doesn't seem to be any solution other than to wait for drivers and perhaps run with 4.1 for now and upgrade later.

Looking at problem 2 there could be a solution but I'm not sure how to achieve it.  I'm thinking that I could use an Openfiler VM to present a 6TB NFS volume which can be accessed directly by the fileserver and/or workstaitions.  Also use it to present a 2TB NFS volume to ESXi for running VMs.

This raises a couple of questions:

1. Is it possible to use the space left on the USB stick after ESXi installation to run the Openfiler VM?
2. If so - what are the issues with running the VM from this USB stick, I know the write/erase cycles are a concern but can this be mitigated by giving the Openfiler VM plenty of RAM and sending logs to a syslog server etc.  Also if the stick dies and takes Openfiler with it am I at risk of losing my data stored on the NFS volumes or will a new Openfiler install with restored configuration get me going again?  Also will performance of the NFS shares be poor due to Openfiler system disk being slow?
3. Can I pass the 3ware RAID card straight through to the Openfiler VM so that it accesses it directly?  If so do I pass the entire card or can I do it on a LUN/LUN basis?  If the latter I could present the 2TB volume directly to VMware and the 6TB volume to Openfiler.

Hope you don't mind me asking these questions here, I don't want to hijack the thread but these seem to link closely to the original posters question so I though it may be best not to duplicate questions in a new thread.  If it's too OT from the original post I'll open up a new one.

Here is an interesting question:

Does the USB show up as a device to busybox? What happens if you try to format VMFS on it from SSH? And them mount it in /vmfs/? How mad will ESXi get? heh...

If it doesn't allow me to format it, how about making a 3GB LUN, dding it to the USB drive, and trying to mount that?

Don't have a virtual ESXi box to play with, but this sounds fun.

[dannycpw]

I'm thinking almost the same ...

1. install ESXi 5 on the USB stick & use it to boot the system.

2. configure SATA controller pass-through

3. create a vm configure file for FreeNAS and assign the SATA controller to it (no vmdk at all)

4. install the FreeNAS directly to those SATA disk with zfs

5. provision NFS back to the physical host & do what we want ...

I just have my new box with the ESXi5 installed & still looking for any way to use those empty space on the USB stick to create a datastore to put the FreeNAS configureation on it. I really don't need to run the FreeNAS on the stick but need space to put the config files...

Hope we can find the solution shortly.

Good luck to all!

[wdroush1]

dannycpw wrote:

I'm thinking almost the same ...

1. install ESXi 5 on the USB stick & use it to boot the system.

2. configure SATA controller pass-through

3. create a vm configure file for FreeNAS and assign the SATA controller to it (no vmdk at all)

4. install the FreeNAS directly to those SATA disk with zfs

5. provision NFS back to the physical host & do what we want ...

I just have my new box with the ESXi5 installed & still looking for any way to use those empty space on the USB stick to create a datastore to put the FreeNAS configureation on it. I really don't need to run the FreeNAS on the stick but need space to put the config files...

Hope we can find the solution shortly.

Good luck to all!

Why not just plug the USB into ESXi, pass it to the FreeNAS, and mount it in /etc?

Dangerous (pulling the USB == dire consequences), but gets you what you want, or to be more safe, stick it on another spot and cron a backup of /etc.

[dannycpw]

The problem is that if we use a UBS to boot up the ESX, there is no datastore to place the FreeNAS vm configuration files (vmx, nvram, etc). As ESX not intend / not allow to create datestore with the empty space on the boot usb disk.

With the above situration, I can't pass through the SATA controller to the FreeNAS but only can assign the onboard controller to the ESX, then create the FreeNAS on top. As there is no datastore to save the vm configuration files ...

What I wanna do is trying to let the FreeNAS to drive the SATA disk directly & needn't sit it on top on a vmfs. As this may introduce additional overhead with ESX ...

More, plug the USB to ESX & assign to FreeNAS is useless for my case, as we need to create those vm configuration files before the assignment ...