2 esxi servers 1 ESATA Enclosure drives not swappable?

[Robert_F]

I have 2 ESXi servers Dell PE2850 both with Raid5

Now i bought a ESATA device with 2 separate drives. Put PCI esata cards in my ESXi servers and are backing up to those drives. Each ESXi server connects to 1 esata drive.

Now the backup script (GhettoVCB) works fine and i can browse to the datastore with VI client.

When i swap the drives I have to add the storage and ESXI will only see an empty drive.

I never formatted the drives since it worked out of the box.

Is it possible to do what i am trying to do?

Thank you.

[RParker]

Is it possible to do what i am trying to do?

Your SATA enclosure has to support 'hot swap'. If it doesn't, it won't work.

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[Robert_F]

I figured it out:

When i swap the drives, the esata storage device disappears. When you than add the storage again it formats the drive.

What i had to do is shut down the ESXi servers before swapping the drives. Once the ESXi servers are back up the swapped drive will show up and I could move the images to my raid storage.

Taking the esata drive out of the enclosure also caused ESXi to hang on a few occasions.

I used this last night to move 2 guest from one host to another.

It is not the best solution but cheap and sufficient till I have ISCSI.

I found part of the answer on another post here.

[jtreyes]

Hello, Which make/model PCI eSATA card did you install. It isn't clear from the HCL which ones will work. Thank you.