copy or uploading files.

[cntsnap]

We just purchased a Dell T710 and have esxi 4. How do I get my VM files that are currently on an external USB drive onto the ESXI Host? ESXI doesn't support USB and the copy process is Painfully slow at best stating that it is going to take about 6 hours to copy my server files of 30 GB. There has got to be an easier way. We are new to ESXI but have been using VMserver for windows for several years.

It only took about 45 mins to copy from the old windows server which supposedly has "poor disk IO" according to all my VMWare buddies.

Another concern with the lack of USB and slow data copy through the interface is that what do we do if we have a disaster and need to get to the data files and copy them off?

Thanks in advance.

[DSTAVERT]

I would add an NFS server to your network. Can be added as a datastore. Can be used for clones of your current VMs. Can be used to transfer USB stored files. Can be a s simple as a standard LINUX install or software like openfiler, freenas. You can also get NAS devices from IOmega, Buffalo, etc. that also support NFS.

[cntsnap]

If its NAS, I'm still limited on copy speed by the network wire. Are there any other ways of getting my files onto the server?

What if my ESXi server crashes and I need to get those files off? What is the best way of doing that?

Also, If I was using VMServer for Windows and I have a bunch of VMDK files, How do I properly migrate those onto the ESXi machine? Easiest processes are much appreciated.

Thanks for your reply!

[oasisinin]

did you give some thoughts to converting them to ESXi?

[Nikhil_Patwa]

Hi,

Use VMWare standalone converter 4.0.1 and it's free, install in any of your workstation and connect your USB drive to it. Make sure your workstation and ESXi server are on the same network. Convert your VMs that are in the USB to the ESXi datastore. The process is pretty fast and you can convert 3-4 VMs simultaneously.

Try this solution.

Nikhil

[bulletprooffool]

Just use somthing like SCP.

Download WinSCP, Veaam's FastSCP.

Simpe to use and about as quick as you'll get it working.

Just remember, if you are moving from Workstation, or Server to ESXi, you'll need to convert the VMs, rather than just copy the files (VM convertor is the tool to use in this instance)

[cntsnap]

Where do I get the standalone converter from? I'm searching for it now but have only found the vmware converter for vsphere.

Found it. Disregard the previous message.

I'll give this a go and see where I come up.

Just to clarify, There is absolutely no way to directly connect external storage to the server to copy files?

[Nikhil_Patwa]

So far I have also failed to connect external storage and directly transfer files to and fro ESXi server.

USB storage is not supported in ESXi server

Nikhil