Using USB drive with ESX 3.5

[brucecmc]

Alright folks, relatively new to the underlying OS of ESX...Have working with VC for about a year, but not a Linux xpert...So, heres the question.

I have a need to attach a USB drive to my ESX host. The intent is to copy the VMDK's from one server to another server across town (no direct connectivity).

I began with connecting the 250GB USB drive to the ESX Host. The host detected it and assigned it a device lable.

However, I'm unable to mount the USB drive as it is formatted NTFS (not supported error). So, I thought I'd format it FAT32...Drive is too big...So, figured I would format it VMFS and then copy the files from the datastore directory to the USB drive.

I thought FDISK would format the drive for me, but I'm apparently not getting the syntax correct..

The real question is,

1) can I format this USB drive as VMFS

2) what is the correct syntax to do so...

My apologies for lacking the basic linux skill set to answer this on my own

Bruce

[vmroyale]

Bruce,

See if this discussion is of any help.

Good Luck!

[khughes]

Another option you can do is hook that USB hard drive up to your PC and then copy down the files using a program like WinSCP / FastSCP, which ever you prefer. It might be easier to do that instead of gimmy up the USB drive to talk directly to your host.

• Kyle

[brucecmc]

ah man...i forgot all about FastSCP...

but, after monkey'ing around with it with the VM support guy, i was able to config the USB drive with VMFS (ext3) file system...bout to test the copying/mounting of the VMDK's in a bit...

[khughes]

WinSCP/FastSCP & Putty are your friends Bruce never forget about them Glad to hear that VMware support got you pointed in the right direction with directly hooking it up. Good luck on your transfers.

• Kyle

[wrob0123]

I got my USB 2.0 external hard drive working for backup on ESX 3.5

The drive came preformatted with NTFS filesystem

To get read/write access I used the ntfs-3g and fuse drivers

see ntfs-3g.org and fuse.sourceforge.net for more info

First I had to workaround the ehci driver problem on my HP DL360 hardware

Since I dont need the USB 1.1 support, I just disabled the ohci driver.

This is what my /etc/modules.conf file looks like after modification:

1. cat /etc/modules.conf

alias eth0 tg3

alias eth1 tg3

alias scsi_hostadapter cciss

#alias usb-controller usb-ohci <--- took out 2 lines

#alias usb-controller1 ehci-hcd <--- added next line

alias usb-controller ehci-hcd

see attachment for build instructions