Home » Categories » Multiple Categories

How To Add A USB Disk As VMFS Datastore In ESXi 6.7

Note

Please note that in the ESXi 6.7 version, USB devices larger than 2TB are not supported.

Step One – Enable SSH Access To ESXi Host

Connect to ESXi IP address, go to Actions and then select Services and Enable Secure Shell (SSH).

Step Two – Connect To ESXi Host Using SSH

With your preferred SSH client, mine is Putty, start a connection to the ESXi host.

Step Three – Stop USB Arbitrator

You have to stop USB Arbitrator Service. The service is used to passthrough the USB devices from hosts to a virtual machine. Once stopped, you will not be able anymore to passthrough USB devices to VMs.

# /etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop

To maintain the stopped status of the service after reboot, insert the command:

# chkconfig usbarbitrator off

Step Four – Plug In The USB Device To The ESXi Host And Get The Device Identifier

Connect USB device to the ESXi host. Then get the device identifier by issuing the following command in Putty:

# ls /dev/disks/

First USB device is the stick which is booting the ESXi software, so the second device is the USB Disk that we’d like to use for the datastore – mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0

Step Five – Write A Label To The Device

Write a gpt label to the USB device using its ID

# partedUtil mklabel /dev/disks/<deviceID> gpt

Step Six – Create Partition

In order to create the partition, we need to have a few info:
1. The start sector: 2048
2. The GUID for VMFS: AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8
3. The end sector. This one should be calculated.

To calculate the end sector, we’ll issue the following command first:

# partedUtil getptbl /dev/disks/<deviceID>

Use this formula to get the end Sector:
243201 * 255 * 63 – 1 = 3907024064

Or you can use this formula:

# eval expr $(partedUtil getptbl /dev/disks/<deviceID> | tail -1 | awk '{print $1 " \\* " $2 " \\* " $3}') - 1

Now we have all the info and we can create the partition using the command:

 # partedUtil setptbl /dev/disks/<deviceID> gpt "1 2048 <endSector> AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0"

Step Seven – Format Partition With VMFS6

We’ll format the partition now with VMFS6. Please be aware that we have “:1” after the deviceID.

# vmkfstools -C vmfs6 -S USB-Storage /dev/disks/<deviceID>:1

Step Eight – Check Datastore In ESXi

Return to ESXi and check the Storage tab. You should see here the new Datastore.

We have managed to add the USB-Disk as VMFS Datstore and we can now deploy VMs on it. I will proceed with the installation of vCenter Appliance.

Source

Article Rating (1 Votes)
Rate this article
  • Icon PDFExport to PDF
  • Icon MS-WordExport to MS Word
 
Attachments Attachments
There are no attachments for this article.
Comments Comments
There are no comments for this article. Be the first to post a comment.
Related Articles RSS Feed
Shrinking VMDK Virtual Disk Size on VMWare ESXi
Viewed 3806 times since Thu, Jan 6, 2022
OVFTool - Error: SHA digest of file ExortedVM.ovf does not match manifest
Viewed 2166 times since Mon, Jan 3, 2022
VMware - Using the OVF Tool deploy
Viewed 663 times since Sun, Jan 2, 2022
Convert Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed Disk to Thin on VMware ESXi by vmkfstools
Viewed 833 times since Sat, Jan 1, 2022
Failed to reconfigure virtual machine Test-VM. The operation is not allowed in the current state.
Viewed 1286 times since Fri, Dec 31, 2021
VMware OVFTool - Deploy .ovf, .ova Error:vim.fault.FileNotFound
Viewed 1684 times since Mon, Jan 3, 2022
Enable content Copy/Paste between VMRC client and Windows/Linux Virtual Machine
Viewed 1068 times since Mon, Jan 3, 2022
Migrate qcow2 images from KVM to VMWare
Viewed 4119 times since Sat, Feb 20, 2021
Convert qcow2 to vmdk
Viewed 1055 times since Tue, Feb 9, 2021
VMware - Using the OVF Tool to export
Viewed 738 times since Sun, Jan 2, 2022