ESXi to use one VM on an entire HD

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Sparkyy

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 16, 2006
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I was hoping someone with more knowledge could tell me how or even if this is possible to do for ESXi 5.

I am thinking of purchasing a 64GB SSD for Ubuntu and will be running a MySQL DB on that system, however I want to have this as a VM on my ESXi but give the entire drive to Ubuntu.

I do not want to create any VMs on this SSD but have the entire drive as an actual drive to serve up to Ubuntu.

Is this at all possible? I figure that doing pass-thru might be the answer but just looking for anyone that has actually done this before.
 
The technique you are looking for is called RDM raw device mapping. I have done this in the past and it is ok. Now I pass entire controllers through to the virtual machines.
 
You can, but you won't get better performance or anything out of it that way. Just drop VMFS on it and throw a big VMDK on it with a slight bit of free space for journaling.
 
lopoetve said:
You can, but you won't get better performance or anything out of it that way. Just drop VMFS on it and throw a big VMDK on it with a slight bit of free space for journaling.
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By doing that, am I in a sense, killing off the SSD and making its life span shorter than normal?
 
if you have enough controllers, then just pass the whole controller through and the drive will then be "native" so to speak to your VM. Better than RDM
 
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