mount usd hard drive and add as new datastore

[hanif1924]

I have a MY Book WD usb drive that I want to mount to my esxi 6.7 host and add as a new datastore.

Any idea how to do this?

[sjesse]

You can't its not supported, but what you can do is, install a linux vm on other storage connect the hard drive there, and setup a nfs server that shares the drive when its mounted in guest.

[hanif1924]

Thanks for the quick response.  Is NFS supported no esxi 6.7?  Could I use your suggestion to build a NFS server on the host and then create a datastore via nfs?

[sjesse]

Yes nfs is supported.

[jonastro]

Hello,

Thanks for posting in VMware communities.

Although this is not supported and not recommended to be used in production environment, if you wanted to use the external hard disk as your datastore for the lab environment the easy way will be to setup FreeNAS server which can be run as a VM and can create datastores either by NFS or via software iSCSI.

Here are couple of walk-thorough guides I have found for you to setup VMware LAB based on FreeNAS

Link 1 - https://www.vladan.fr/vmware-home-lab-building-nas-at-home-to-keep-the-costs-down-installing-freenas...

Link 2 - https://johnkeen.tech/freenas-11-iscsi-esxi-6-5-lab-setup/

Regards,

Jonathan