Is there an alternative to upload to datastore other than Windows GUI?

[ddewey]

Is there an alternative way to upload iso's to the datastore on vSphere/ESXi other than the Windows vSphere Client GUI?

I've got four ESXi 4 update 1 hosts and a vCenter Server 4 running as a VM on one of those hosts. They all have shared SAN, but we are a very Linux based company, with allot of people working from home with terrible uplink speeds. They have isos on their Linux development machines, but there isn't a GUI for Linux. Is there a way to upload ISO's to the shared SAN/Datastore without enable SSH on the hosts, and without forcing the users to download to their Windows box then uploading it again to the vSphere Datastore? Straight Linux box to Datastore?

Thanks

[geddam]

I use FileZilla with SFTP for these kind of acitivities, just works fine and faster. But again need a root privilege to do. Uploading files to datastore requires admin privileges....

Thanks,,

Ramesh. Geddam,

VCP 3&4, MCTS(Hyper-V).

Please award points, if helpful

[ddewey]

SFTP on ESXi 4? How does that get enabled without SSH? I just tried it and the host refused it. And I did try the root user. There's got to be a way to do this without requiring the admin user. Like a way to upload and nothing else. If not, then VMware needs to add this feature in, it's too dangerous to only allow Admin to upload. It's also very inconvenient to only allow upload through Windows (assuming the SFTP doesn't work).

Thanks

[geddam]

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_enable_FTP.php

Same works for 4 as well..

Thanks,,

Ramesh. Geddam,

VCP 3&4, MCTS(Hyper-V).

Please award points, if helpful

[ddewey]

According to this page, I would have to enable SSH. I think you missed the part in my post that said without enabling SSH.

[geddam]

As menitoned earlier, transferring files to datastores need admin privileges like root....For an ESXi addition, there is no other option I can think of....

Thanks,,

Ramesh. Geddam,

VCP 3&4, MCTS(Hyper-V).

Please award points, if helpful

[RParker]

Is there an alternative way to upload iso's to the datastore on vSphere/ESXi other than the Windows vSphere Client GUI?

What's wrong with the client

Also something to keep in mind, ESX is NOT a Linux box. It doesn't have users and it's not designed for multiple user access and uploading files, or acting like an FTP server. It's a VM HOST, and that's it. You can add users of course, but mostly you add it to a Virtual Center, and it's part of a datacenter.

So you MUST use the Administrator / root to upload files, OR use the client to give users with specific rights to a host to upload files.

But you shouldn't be uploading ISO to the datastore anyway, users can mount ISO from their client, or you can create an NFS store, and connect your ESX hosts to it. If you do it right you won't have to ever load an ISO or worry about "admin" access again.

But veeam.com does have a tool that will work with ESXi. FAST SCP version 3.0 works fine.

[ddewey]

Nothing is wrong with the Windows GUI, the problem is, I've got allot of users who have ISO's on their Linux boxes. Some of those users work from home and have only one option to upload an ISO to the datastore, which would be to download to the Windows laptop, then upload to the datastore. Those that work from home, have bad upload speeds. So we are trying to cut out the middle man from putting ISO's from the machine their on (which is Linux), to the ESXi machine it needs to be on. No windows man in the middle.

How can the users mount the iso from the client? I only see three options, client device (which would be the physical drive on the machine the client runs on), host device (the host physical drive), then there is the mount iso from datastore. Where is the option to mount an iso on the client machine?

Thanks

[lamw]

So there is one additional option, again it'll still require the appropriate permission to upload a file to the datastore. You can utlize vCLI's vifs which can be used to upload/download files to a given datastore, it's not the fastest thing in the world and there are things you might be able to do to increase the speeds, but basically it's using http/https get/puts.

Here's some more information about vifs - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/esx_3i_rcli/vifs.php

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[vmroyale]

Hello.

>Is there a way to upload ISO's to the shared SAN/Datastore without enable SSH on the hosts, and without forcing the users to download to their Windows box then uploading it again to the vSphere Datastore? Straight Linux box to Datastore?

The vSphere Command-Line Interface can be used. The vifs.pl script can be used to upload files to ESXi datastores. It doesn't require SSH to be enabled, but it does require root to actually upload files. It's not exactly what you want, but probably as close as is possible at this time.

Good Luck!

[arifshuailahame]

Hi,

In your reply you have mentioned, "So there is one additional option, again it'll still require the appropriate permission to upload a file to the datastore".

What is the appropriate permission??

Actually I'm trying to upload a file to datastore using http put request. It works fine with adminsitrator account but not with other account.Can you please give me the list of permissions to be set to an user so that files can be uploaded to datastore??