Is access to ESX/ESXi mandatory?

[vohra]

Hi

My application is running on a machine which has access to only the vCenter(VC) and NOT the individual hosts. Individual hosts are

in a private network only visible to the vCenter machine. When I try to do disk read/write I get server refused connection error when the VDDK

fails to access the ESX Host. Is there a way to get around this problem as in a WAN environment this is a pretty common scenario. I was

expecting that all the communication can still go through VC as I am connecting VDDK to VC and via vpx user VC has access to all the hosts.

vohra

[njain]

Hi Vohra,

You should be able to read/write on virtual disks by connecting to vCenter server, provided you can access the storages on which virtual disks reside via vCenter. Do the username/password credentials provided in VixDiskLibConnectParams (when making a connection) have sufficent permissions to access these VMDKs?

[giladb]

I was having the same problems a while ago, and got a response that I should change the transport I used.

That didn't help.

It would be very helpful if we can get a clear statement and/or documentation from VMware about the connectivity requirements for VDDK.

vohra: Did you notice if the VDDK traffic is clear or encrypted in your case ? In my case it was in the clear, which is also a problem

[admin]

For network transports (nbd and nbdssl), the ESX host must be accessible to the client via network. The data does not go through VC - that would make it too slow.

However for hotadd and san transports, this is not the case - though that won't help you much in a WAN environment.

Thanks

Sudarsan