I remember this being a huge pain in the butt before. In ESXi 5.1 I need clone multiple VM's and then copy them to a USB attached external hard drive. I do remember this being possible, but I don't remember how to do it.
First thing is getting the VM Host to recognize that the external hard drive is actually there. I have a VM guest on that server with a USB Controller added, but no luck getting the host or the guest seeing it.
Hi KevinSampson,
I'm not quite sure what the issue maight be, but please let me know following:
I guess you attached the USB Attached External HardDrive to the ESXi Host?
If so, you will have to configure the USB Attached External HardDrive as a Drive to be recognized by the ESXi Host.
Now you can copy the Files you wish to be on that volume direclty from the SSH, so you don't have to start the arbitrator service, but if you wish to do if from a vGuest where you use robocopy or such, then you will have to do point 5.
Best regards,
Marco
Well, the first problem I'm seeing is that I would need to reformat my 4TB external drive to FAT16 ... which apparently is only usable on drives up to 2GB? Currently, it's NTFS and without really meaning to I managed to add it as an external hard drive to one of my VM Guests. Not really sure that helps me, but I guess it's something. I can reformat it to ExFAT easily enough if that's needed, but I think that one tops out at 2TB?
If I'm missing something here, then let me know. Is there any way I can copy Templates to it as-is (attached to a VM guest) or even possibly with it attached to a different computer? The VM Hosts are old and none have USB 3.0 connections, which is yet another thing I'm trying to work around. I did get to a point that the Host recognizes the storage adapter, but it's not recognizing it as storage. Of course that's in the V-Center console, I'll see what I can see in command line.
Update: Okay getting "Connection Refused" attempting to SSH in ... even though everything seems to be setup correctly for it. LOL, the fun never ends.