ESXi 3.5 U2 - Host File Sharing (Samba)

[Trent_Curtis]

I am wondering if ESXi will support some type of File Sharing, such as Samba. It would be nice to be able to copy virtual machines from the ESXi Host for backup purposes. If its not supported, has anyone tried installing Samba on it?

Trent

[weinstein5]

It is not supported - only files systems that you can use to store ESX/ESXi VM are a VMFS datastore and NFS datastore -

[kjb007]

There is a utility called smbclient that will allow you to mount a CIFS share on the esx hosts. It works like ftp/sftp, but for cifs/smb. You can't run a samba server, by default, but you can load the rpm's, but I would recommend instead to use the smbclient to put the files to a share as needed. That way, you don't have to add anything additional to the hosts that is not required.

-KjB

[kjb007]

Sorry for the double-post, the forum software appears to have had issues.

-KjB

Message was edited by: kjb007

[Peter_vm]

There is a utility called smbclient that will allow you to mount a CIFS share on the esx hosts. It works like ftp/sftp, but for cifs/smb. You can't run a samba server, by default, but you can load the rpm's, but I would recommend instead to use the smbclient to put the files to a share as needed. That way, you don't have to add anything additional to the hosts that is not required.

And how would you do that in ESXi which is not Linux OS? As far as I know there is no smbclient in ESXi.

But NFS works. Better than SCP (no encryption/decryption).

[kjb007]

My mistake. I missed the "i".

You can still accomplish this using the datastore browser from the vi client. Map the network share locally on your client machine and download the vm files using the datastore browser.

-KjB

[Trent_Curtis]

I was looking for an easy way to automate backup of VMDK files. I'll keep searching!

Trent

[Peter_vm]

My mistake. I missed the "i".

You can still accomplish this using the datastore browser from the vi client. Map the network share locally on your client machine and download the vm files using the datastore browser.

Yes, but that is hard to automate.