USB drive on esx server

[cirilramos]

Do you another solution other than anywhereUSB by digi? anywhereUSB is very slow. We need to transfer large amount of data (+300GB) on regular basis from usb drive.

[Peter_vm]

Mount USB drive somewhere else and share it over the network.

How "very slow" is slow?

[cirilramos]

very very very slow.

i created a script that will compare the copying to anywhereusb and another server to make sure it is not the network.the usb is a flash key. it took 25 seconds to copy a 10 MB file while it took 2 seconds over the network. here is the result.

D:\>copy.bat

result of copying to usb flash drive (d)

7:51:02.85

E:\test.log

1 File(s) copied

7:51:27.69

result of copying to another server

7:51:27.75

E:\test.log

1 File(s) copied

7:51:29.81

D:\>dir

Volume in drive D has no label.

Volume Serial Number is 0000-4FEE

Directory of D:\

04/26/2008 07:50 AM 207 copy.bat

09/14/2007 08:00 AM 10,330,294 test.log

2 File(s) 10,330,501 bytes

0 Dir(s) 1,000,161,280 bytes free

[cirilramos]

I think I know why it is slow. It only support usb version 1.1.

[RDPetruska]

Thread moved to ESX forums from the VMware Server forum.

[cirilramos]

is there any other solution for usb drive on esx server?

[admin]

Unfortunately there is no other way to do what your trying to do on ESX server.

The ideal solution would be to copy the data you are trying to backup / move / copy from the shared storage, not directly from the ESX host.

[kjb007]

Well, if all you want to do is copy data from a usb drive, then you may be able to connect the usb drive to your esx host. On ESX, you can use USB, just typically not those USB devices that require access from the VMs.

Once the ESX host sees the drive, mount the drive, and then you can use smbclient to copy the info to a windows share on a vm. I am assuming you need to copy it to a windows vm.

-KjB

[cirilramos]

I was thinking about that solutiion but I'm worried loading the service console on esx server. We're planning to copy 300GB on average. Do you think it's ok?

[kjb007]

You already have a service console with ESX 3.5. I used to use a usb drive all the time when I had to update patches, and my networking was not yet in place. The service console is also a RedHat Enterprise 3 server, so it has the usb modules built in. All you are doing is making the drive available to the console, and then running a mount from there. You should not have any problems with that. Only when you try to do things that are not built into the product already would I be worried.

-KjB