Advice on disk setup and how to access across multiple VM's

[Imranq]

I am really confused with this.

I have a Home Lab on a HP Gen8 MicroServer running ESXi 6.5u1.

1 Datastore 400GB with some Server/Client VMs

The Datastore is part of a 2TB SATA Disk. I have 1.43TB available which is visible under Storage > Devices

I use the same IP Range across all devices 192.168.0.x

I want to use the 1.4TB disk as a shared drive which I can access across my Client and Server VMs and also from my laptop that I RDP into those VMs on my ESXi host.

The main idea is to copy and store files I download and need to install etc. This is so I do not have to upload each file individually to the datastore via the datastore browser web interface.

I currently do this with a very old NAS disk on the network but this is slow and not working well as the disk goes into power save mode and it's a pain to wake it back up.

It is also not letting me create that free space into a new Datastore.

I can only expand the existing 400GB VMFS datastore into the full free space of the disk 1.43TB.

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

I'm not exactly sure what you are wanting to do here, but if you only have a single 2 TB disk, or even if you have one virtual disk of that size, it counts as one extent. You can't have multiple VMFS datastore from a single extent. Your best bet may be to extend the datastore and create a file share through one of your VMs to make available on your flat network.

[Imranq]

Thanks for your advice, I have done exactly that.

Extended the datastore > Added new HD to VM and Shared it as NFS.