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I should know this but...

sabregen

sabregen

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Joined
Jun 6, 2005
Messages
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Long story short, I have built a WHS VM in Workstation 7. The VM disk is thin provisioned, so when it's off it's currently only 4.75GB of disk (5.25 when on). There's no data on it other than Windows Updates and a uTorrent client. I plan to deploy this VM to replace the physical box that is currently running WHS. Okay, now the rub.

In Workstion I know that I can give a VM direct access to a disk. This is perfect for WHS, where the OS is managing the drives, data on them, shares, users, backups, etc.

However, as my new build performs like crap for gaming (but great for everything else), I am replacing the motherboard (currently MSI K9ND Speedster) with a real server board (virtualization support, PCI-X, PCI-E, SATA, SAS, IPMI, etc). Since I have to update my VCP v3 to v4 before the end of the year, I would like to play around with some things, but ultimately have the box running ESX4 or 4i when it's all said and done. So... the question is:

Can ESX3.5, 3.5i, 4 or 4i give a VM guest direct access to a physical disk drive? The controller in question may vary some (but all are on the ESX HCL), but note that I am not concerned with RAID functionality, at all. As a matter of fact, RAID would break the disk configuration that I'm going for. So, can it be done, or will I have to run Workstation to get this functionality?

For the curious, hardware specs on rig in question:

Rocketfish full tower
Antec TPT 650w
(currently) MSI K9ND Speedster v1.1 w/8MB BIOS (Nforce Pro 3600)
(coming soon) Arima NX470 (Nforce Pro 3600 + Vitesse SAS + IPMI + 2x amount of memory slots, onboard video)
Stock AMD coolers
2x Opteron 8354 2.2GHz quads
4x2GB PC2-5300 ECC Reg
Dell SAS 5/iR
WD 1TB Green, WD 500GB, Samsung 160GB, Seagate 320GB (WHS storage - these are the ones I want to map to the WHS VM)
4x80GB Seagate 2.5" SATA 5400RPM (will be connected to SAS5/iR, mounted in Supermicro SAS/SATA HS 8-in-2 enclosure - RAID-0 VMFS datastore)
4x36.7GB Seagate Savvio 10k SAS 2.5" (will be connected to SAS5/iR, mounted in Supermicro SAS/SATA HS 8-in-2 enclosure - 1 boot, the others in RAID-0 VMFS datastore)
....blah, blah, blah
 
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Short answer: Not supported.
Long answer: Yes.
Longer answer: WHS should work just fine in a VMDK, why not use one? :)
 
whs is already a vmdk disk, but i have existing whs drives that i need to mount to the vm, hence the need for passthrough.
 
Sure If I can get 2 spare 1TB drives to facilitate the move, then I'm in business. But I don't have 2TB of spare disk. So there's no disk passthrough to a VM in ESX (I know in 3.5 there wasn't)? Crap... that means I will have to run a host OS, then workstation, then guests which is more overhead than I had hoped for.
 
lol...maybe you can take off your employee hat and point me in the right direction? I do a lot of unsupported stuff. I would love to know from a technical end how to accomplish it.
 
lol, umm.... I'm no command line guru. The basic gist of the thread that you linked seems to indicate that there was a lacking (on the OPs post) parameter in the .VMDK pointer file to the actual block mapped device, right? I understand the principle, but am not versed enough to understand what the hell they are actually saying.
 
Sabregen, I'm disappointed :p

Read the last comment in the thread. IIRC, it has the answer. :)

edit: And go learn command line! CLI > *.
 
yeah, well, you're not the first one. I re-read it, and I got it now. I will have to try to replicate this here on my end, probably under Workstation 7, first (virtualizing ESX).


...grumble, grumble... YOU learn it :)

I'm gonna have to, I suppose. I spent the week studying for IBM Storage Networking Solutions v4 (passed yesterday), my head was not really in the game when I originally posted, or read the thread you linked.
 
DO NOT Convert your WHS DATA to VMDK's!!!

That is the worst possible thing you could do.
Will it work for now...yes
When your Install image is corrupt or the disk dies and you have to reinstall will it work....NO
When you go to move your data to a new system or need to pull a drive for other reasons can you see whats on that disk without the VM....NO

Ive done this and it was a nightmare trying to get my data back.
 
nitrobass24 said:
DO NOT Convert your WHS DATA to VMDK's!!!

That is the worst possible thing you could do.
Will it work for now...yes
When your Install image is corrupt or the disk dies and you have to reinstall will it work....NO
When you go to move your data to a new system or need to pull a drive for other reasons can you see whats on that disk without the VM....NO

Ive done this and it was a nightmare trying to get my data back.
Click to expand...

No more than any other disk failure. :confused:

Nothing is a replacement for backups.
 
I was not going to convert my WHS storage pool disks to VMDK's. Just the System drive, which the installer would chop into 20/60, and if I thin provisioned that disk, hopefully it wouldn't take up too much space on disk. From there, I would take my existing drives and map them to the VM, and do a restore instead of a regular install, thereby pulling all of shares, users, and backups into the environment.

Then I could install the connector software onto the host machine (assuming I use VMware workstation here), and have the WHS-VM backing up it's own system drive (.vmdk) to a location that's not on the host's main system disk.

I forgot that I could virtualize ESX4 in Workstation7. Between that and my IBM BladeCenter environment at the office, I should be good to go on VCP prep hardware.
 
sabregen said:
I was not going to convert my WHS storage pool disks to VMDK's. Just the System drive, which the installer would chop into 20/60, and if I thin provisioned that disk, hopefully it wouldn't take up too much space on disk. From there, I would take my existing drives and map them to the VM, and do a restore instead of a regular install, thereby pulling all of shares, users, and backups into the environment.

Then I could install the connector software onto the host machine (assuming I use VMware workstation here), and have the WHS-VM backing up it's own system drive (.vmdk) to a location that's not on the host's main system disk.

I forgot that I could virtualize ESX4 in Workstation7. Between that and my IBM BladeCenter environment at the office, I should be good to go on VCP prep hardware.
Click to expand...

Backing up your host to the WHS VM is pointless because if the host fails, so does your WHS System Drive VMDK and without it you cant access the backup to do a restore.
So it adds no value and you just waste space.
 
yeah, i thought of that too. ah well. no biggie. i'll put the whs vm system disk .vmdk on a different disk than the host os system disk.
 
RDMs of local disks or partitions is indeed unsupported. I've seen bad things happen (though funnily I can't remember what specific things happened).
But anyway, VMDK is an open standard that you can move to and from. If you ever want to move away from the VMDK format for any reason (say you had a cool deal on iSCSI/Fibre storage or found direct-attach storage that was supported for use as an RDM), you can literally use dd or clone the disk to the destination device.

For example:

vmkfstools -i <input>.vmdk /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba<B>:<T>:<L>:<P>
Or
dd if=input-flat.vmdk of=/vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba<B>:<T>:<L>:<P> bs=1M

It's really not that big of a deal getting the info onto a physical medium.

Edit: If given a choice, do the vmkfstools command over the dd. Vmkfstools is given full resources of the VMkernel, while dd is limited to the resources that the Service Console has (limited disk shares, for one).
 
In four, you have to use the vml or naa device, but Kachunk is right.

DD may or may not copy correctly - vmkfstools uses the vmkernel stack and does some minimal error correction as it goes and checks as it goes as well. Definitely use vmkfstools if you can :)
 
Yup, otherwise /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.<your-device> for ESX 4.x

It's oversimplified, but /vmfs/* is a bit like ESX's version of your typical /dev nodes.
 
Kachunkachunk said:
Yup, otherwise /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.<your-device> for ESX 4.x

It's oversimplified, but /vmfs/* is a bit like ESX's version of your typical /dev nodes.
Click to expand...

For disks yep!, and the traditional /dev nodes do exist - the World 0 VM gets them as a pseudo device for block access if needed (Barring a persistent reservation or stranded reservation keeping us from reading the lvm metadata or other information on the volume to assign it a linux node.
 
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