Windows 10: Esxi users -- using RAW (physical ) disks in VM's

Hi folks

those of you who are trying / using Esxi then it;s possible to pass thru (or attach) physical RAW disks to your VM's - so you can attach existing Windows (NTFS) or Linux formatted disks and also RAID configured arrays as RAW disks.

For software RAID attach the disks individually and then when the guest starts the VM should recognize the array in the normal way. Same with Windows storage spaces (although I'm not a big fan of those).

This link represents how to do it easily

How to passthrough SATA drives directly on VMWare ESXI 6.5 as RDMs . GitHub

If you DO try Esxi note you can run the OS easily from a USB stick -- it's a TINY OS and once the OS is booted you can remove the USB stick as the Esxi is memory resident (tiny OS so hardly any memory or resources used).

Note though the RAW disks can't be part of "the data store" though -- for testing I tried a USB for the Esxi OS and a data store on an external USB SSD --SSD attached to computer via USB-->SATA connector.

You should be able to get near native speeds from your VM's == well worth an experiment with if you have a bit of time -- do the ESXi install to a USB stick so you don't need to touch existing Windows etc installations.

Sound also works BTW on VM's !!!

Cheers
jimbo

:)

 

Windows 2012 Licensing on ESXi

In a Windows 2012 standard license we can have only 2 VMs; so in one ESXi server(of any sockets) we can host a maximum of 2 VMs; so in my environment we have 3 esxi hosts in a cluster with each running 2 VMs.



so please let me know how much Windows standard/Datacenter license should I procure.



As per my understanding; i will require 3 datacenter licenses.



We cannot have 3 standard windows license because we can have only 2 VMs per host (3 servers); this is OK in ideal case scenario.



But if we need to move one VM from one ESXi host to another i.e

ESXi 1 having 1 VMs

ESXi 2 having 3 VMs ---> violation of licensing

ESXi 3 having 2 VMs

then it will be a violation of the licensing policies.



Please correct if my understanding is wrong.

 

ESXi 4.0 and Ubuntu LTS VM Raw Drive Mapping/Software Raid

I don't really think of one as more powerful or not, they're just aimed at different situations.

Server: computer -> host OS -> Server -> VMs.

ESXi: computer -> ESXi -> VMs.

If you, for example, wanted to use ICHxR or any other RAID controller not supported under ESXi, you could set up the array, install the host OS, then install VMware Server and create VMs.

But if this way is working for you, then by all means go ESXi. It's "closer" to the hardware, so performance is a little better and there's no issues when rebooting a host OS for updates and whatnot.

 

ESXi 4.0 and Ubuntu LTS VM Raw Drive Mapping/Software Raid

you will be able to map those drives to an ubuntu system. from there when you setup your VM software just reference that mount point. i suggest using command line to mount those drives, not the GUI. i am pretty sure there is open source software for software based raid 5 but i have never set that up before. look into cloud software which is what you want to do essentially.