Adding a second Physical HDD

[zzit123]

Hello,

   I just installed vmware esxi on an IBM x3250 server with two removable drive bays. My question is, is there a way to get vmware to recognize the second hard drive in the second bay as well as the one running the vmware host server OS? An option we would like to explore would be to implement raid mirroring on the second drive for redundancy but we can't unless there is a way to use both bays some how. Any suggestions/instructions?

Thank You in advance.

[Nikhil_Patwa]

You can do RAID 1 mirroring before installing VMware ESXi, the hardware based RAID 1. This way if 1 of your hard disk goes bad you can still continue with your second one.

nikhil

[DSTAVERT]

ESX(i) only supports hardware RAID. If the server does have the hardware RAID option you would need to establish the mirroring before installing. For performance you will also want to make sure you add the battery backed RAID cache module. Disk performance will be dismal with out it.

[bulletprooffool]

If you're adding new disks and want to add them to the ESX as datatsore, you could try this:

http://www.get-virtual.info/2011/02/09/adding-datastores-to-esxi-hosts-that-have-already-been-built/

good luck