External USB 2TB (NTFS) drive not recognized

[kurtsailorman]

Dear colleagues,

I´m a complete VMWare newbie who inherited the ESX structure from my predecessor. The host Server is installed on Linux and I´m accessing it via my virtual Win 2003 server installation. Hope I can turn to you with my question:

I´m running a mailserver on Win2003 and wanted for the backups add an external 2TB drive. I thought I´d be simple add it in Win 2003 vm ware config and would see the resource in Windows after restart. Of course this didn´t happen.

I cannot even see it in available resources. I read some of the similar posts here and some say this USB support is not available in ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 and that I have to upgrade. Others say it´s enough to reconfig the VMX file to add USB support. I had a look in the log of vmware and it says (see below) that it actually sees it, so there might be a glimpse of hope.

Yes, I plugged and unplugged it several times in despair:)

The whole problem is worse that I even cannot access the host server correctly as have zero knowledge of Linux and am looking on whole thing only through Win 2003 client installation. So the eventuall upgrade wouldn´t be an easy thing as well...

Can I please ask you for help if there´s any workaround that would solve this? Thanks a lot

Infrastructure Client 2.5.0 (build 147633)
ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 (build 199239)

[nshetty · Accepted solution]

Hello,

The feature is not available in 3.x, it is available from 4.1.

Upgrade the environment to 4.1 or above, this would help you in making use of additional features and bug fixes.

Cheers,

NS

[kurtsailorman]

Hello nshetty,

thank you very much for an answer. As I mentioned the main server is Linux based and I guess upgrade cannot be done from virtual PC but on the host, that means through Linux, am I right?

[nshetty]

yes you would have to upgrade the ESX/ESXi 3.5 to higher version.

[kurtsailorman]

Thanks a lot for info.