VMware Cloud Community
Eire09
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎10-15-2009 08:27 AM

Local storage becoming shared storage!

Hi,

I have 600GB of local storage on a ESXi host. I'd like to make this storage shared if possible. Any suggestions on how to go about doing this?

I have iSCSI storage also which is used for my production VM's.

Thanks in advance guys

0 Kudos
3 Replies
Datto
Expert
Expert
‎10-15-2009 08:43 AM

If fast disk performance is not a requirement, you could download the free OpenFiler VM and use OpenFiler to supply iSCSI targets to your ESX hosts while OpenFiler uses the 600gb of space to provide shared storage. Note that your disk performance for VMs on this shared storage will not be all that great but it would make use of the 600GB of space with little to no cost extra cost.

OpenFiler is here:

http://www.openfiler.com

Datto

TimPhillips
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎10-16-2009 05:24 AM

I would you to use StarWind as shared storage, using RDM import it VM, and make it a shared storage using either diskbridge or creatig a target on it.

0 Kudos
BearHuntr
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-16-2009 09:02 AM

I tried both Openfiler and Starwind, but had odd issues with each. I ended up using the VirtualSAN free app at http://www.phdvirtual.com/download?task=view.download&cid=10. The install guide is located at http://www.phdvirtual.com/support/knowledge-center/category/15-virtualization-utilities. This was pretty easy to setup and it offers synchronization between the local disk on 2 ESX hosts, which was nice. So far, performance hasn't been an issue, but I'm not running much on it yet.

0 Kudos