WHS on ESXi with direct disk access?

[killervette]

I am currently using Hyper-V with WHS (windows home server) installed and about 7 sata drives added to the drive pool. They are direct physical disk access. This way, if for some reason my main HD goes down, i can plug in a hard drive and access my files. they are not contained in a VHD file.

Can i do something similar to this setup on ESXi? I have tried it and cant choose RAW map to the drive (it is greyed out). I am worried about adding all my files (over 2TB) to a vmdk file. What happens if it gets corrupted. Is all my data gone??

Thanks for the help

[Jackobli]

Hello and welcome to the VMware community forum.

Unlike Windows Server 2008, ESXi does not support every piece of hardware.

Please name your hardware (Server type, mainboard)! Have you checked the HCL or some whitebox lists, like Dave's one? Are these disks connected to a controller, that is on the HCL too?

Just curious, why would you like to switch to ESXi and why not staying at Windows Server 2008?

[killervette]

Well, all the hardware works fine. Its an Intel Boxdq35joe motherboard and a intel pro nic. Also, have a Promise Sata300 TX4 sata controller. I trust a VM environment more than Hyper V Server. Plus, it supports linux better.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

RDMs are for use with FC / iSCSI LUNs. With local SCSI devices you can create a generic SCSI device to get access to drives, but that doesn't seem to work with SATA controllers.

Could you use smaller VMDKs (say 500 MB) to reduce the risk of one going corrupt? How is the Sata300 TX4 working for you? Do you have RAID working or is ESXi just seeing individual drives?

[killervette]

I am very new to esxi and vm products. i am home user. I guess my main concern is what happens if a drive dies that is in the WHS drive pool. Granted, i have duplicating turned on, so the data would be on another drive. How do i do a backup of just the OS drive of WHS and not my 2TB of data.

I noticed that esxi uses its own file system. So, what if my esxi system disk dies? how do i access my files.

I am just being cautious.

As for the Sata controller, i cant remember if I used a drive on that controller in ESXi yet. I will have to try it and check. It would be just single drives, not raid.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

If you were to add a drive to your ESXi host, you'd create a datastore on it and then whatever quantity of virtual hard drives on it. For example, you could add a 1 TB drive and then create 2 x 450 GB virtual HDs. You wolud add those to your WHS VM and it would see that you've added to 450 GB drives. It wouldn't know what had been done at the ESXi datastore level.

How do i do a backup of just the OS drive of WHS and not my 2TB of data.

Create a 60 GB (I believe WHS needed something at least that large to install on) virtual drive for the OS and then add addition VMDKs for your datastore. Personally I would still backup the data to another host / drive /etc.

How do i do a backup of just the OS drive of WHS and not my 2TB of data.

you could run a repair install which would leave the VMFS datastores alone and just wipe the system partitions for ESXi. Then you could browse to your VM's files and add it back to inventory. As I mention above, I'd still backup the data to something physically seperate.

[killervette]

Thanks, your explanation helps! I dont like the idea of having to backup my data elsewhere. The purpose of WHS is to be that place. I have an online backup for the most important things, but backuping up over 2TB of data that changes weekly would be time consuming, an added expense, and a pain

I will give it another try and see how it goes.