Mount Common Storage as hard drive for Guest Shared Storage

[vtphilk]

Does anyone know if it is possible to somehow mount a disk to a SAN or something that I can share among multiple RUNNING guest windows machines?

I have been trying to come up with a solution to copy files from a VSphere console and host for sometime and never have found the magic bullet of a solution.  We have a server running ESXi 5 for the host and vsphere vcenter.  We have about 30 guest OS images mostly all windows 7 machines that are used for remote site access to secure networks.  We login to the ESX console so that when we VPN into the remote sites we still can get to our troubleshooting tools on our local LAN and also share the session with multiple engineers that might be required to resolve a complicated problem.

The problem is from time to time we want to be able to move files from the Guest to our local pc running the vsphere remote console plugin/client.  Since vsphere is not like vmware player/workstation where you can drag and drop files this is very difficult and requires us to move files to a local network dropbox then from there to our PC.  The problem is when we are in the secure networks the VPN blocks the guest OS from all over network access (Thus why we must use the console access).

I have played with setting up vnc on the host and we use that to share the session however I have not found a good way to copy files like small log files etc.. off without disconnecting from the secure network, then droping to a dropbox via windows etc..  Things I have tried and seem to work just not that 'great':

1) I have been sucessfull in creating a ISO file on my local PC with the files I need to send, then mount the ISO, the grab from the fake CDrom in the guest OS.  So I suppose if you had some sort of magic driver that would create a fake ISO on your PC that can be changed you could drag and drop files to that.

2) Also I have found the VMware Guest Console allows "File Explorer" to the guest without having network access within the guest however it is very very slow.

I also read about doing something on a SAN with a shared file storage iscsi and creating a second virtual device.  So I was thinking if I created a extra virtual hard disk on each guest that was connected to some sort of shared SAN storage that would work.  However, I have not gotten this working or tell if it would work.  We have a EMC SAN.

I know the stance of VMware is well the ESX is for servers..blah blah..you should not be copying files its not safe.  I just wish they would allow drag and drop via a VMX file edit like they do for VNC or something.  Would make my life much easier!!

Thanks for any ideas anyone might have!