Lost on adding an array to existing ESXi setup

T

tgs

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 9, 2011
Messages
91
ESXi 5.0 running on a Poweredge R710.

Dell SAS6 is handling the following drives:
1x 64Gb SSD that has a few VMs on it.
1x 250Gb with ISOs.


On the same controller above I am adding in:
2x 2tb RAID 1 (this will eventually evolve into a 4x 2Tb Raid 10 for 4Tb of storage)
The array has files on it already which I do not want to destroy.


My goal is to have this storage area be accessible by two of the VMs running. Both are windows servers which can read NTFS (which the array is already formatted in).

I can't figure out how to add this array to be available to the two VMs though without converting it to a datastore and destroying the data on it. Is it just not possible?
 
I am fairly new to ESXi, but from what I understand the options are as follows:
1) Wipe and use a drive/array as a datastore
2) create a LUN on an existing array to use as a datastore
3) mount an NFS export as a datastore

And judging from my options under datastore, it doesn't look like there is any way to work around those three options:

http://i.imgur.com/CFeyl.png
 
If he wipes the drive he loses the data...that's the point of his question.

You can pass a local LUN through to a VM...generic SCSI passthrough, I think it's called. I've never done it but Google it. It's not hard. You can't do an RDM to a local controller...so you do the SCSI passthrough (Not talking VMDirectPath). vSphere just passes a local LUN to the VM.
 
How does your option 2 fix his problem? Mine passes the LUN through as a device to the VM guest at which point he can mount it and access the data.
 
Thanks for the help, I've gone ahead and grabbed a few more drives from Newegg along with a PCI holder for the SSD. I figure I'll just move the SSD holding the VMs off of the backplane and have the onboard handle it so I can do passthrough.
 
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