Iso image repository problem

[drewbenzing]

I have been storing all of our os CDs and DVDs in a file share on a windows server and mounting the smbfs share on all of my ESX hosts. This worked fine for my 3.x ESX hosts. In 4.0 it appears that smbfs is no longer supported. So I have mounted my iso share using cifs with the following command "mount -t cifs //server/share /vmimages/iso/ -o username=xxx,workgroup=xxx,password=-xxx". This appears to work fine and I can browse all of the directories in the windows share and see all of my isos from the host and from the vSphere client, but when I want to mount an iso from the share in a vm via the vSphere client it will not actually connect the vms cd drive to the iso. Am I doing something wrong or is this no longer supported in ESX 4? Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

There are some security related reasons why you do not want to go down this route but there is another route to go down and that is to use an NFS share from your windows device. This way your ISO repository can appear as a datastore within VMware ESX 4.

In many cases using an NFS datastore will be quite a bit better moving forward.

however you could check out /etc/vmware/configrules to determine if your mounted CIFS share is available to be used for ISO images.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, Virtualization Practice Analyst[/url]
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