best practices for setting up a file server data HDD

[atomicrabbit]

I'm fairly new to VMWare ESXi and have been setting up a Dell T20 as a test machine. I'm setting up a VM for a Windows file server and was wondering what the best practices for setting up a data storage hard drive.

Can I directly access a partitioned HDD?

Or Do I set up the HDD as a RDM or virtual disk?

Or something else?

Again, I'm new to this, so any help is appreciated.

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

there are several options to do this. I usually create separate virtual disks for OS and data which allows to resize the disks/partitions if required, and gives me the option to attach the data disk to another VM if needed (e.g. in case of guest OS corruption).

André

[atomicrabbit]

Thanks for the reply a.p. and sorry for the late response, I got a bit busy.

As for using a VMDK:

- If I ever needed to move the file storage, how easy would it be?

- How does this work if I wanted to add more storage -- can I add a HDD and extend the VMDK?

- How does this work with a RAID controller?

If it's just going to be a simple file storage HDD, why can't the VM access the HDD directly?

"there are several options to do this..."

What are the other options?

FYI, currently I have a 1TB HDD (datastore) that stores the VM OSs and I have a separate 2TB HDD that will be used for a file store.