Adding more storage to vmware

[Saltious]

Hello all.

I am a complete noob to this vmware stuff so please be gentle.

I have basically inherited a vmsetup that appears to have less resources than the san marino air force.

we have 2 blades with 4 gb memory in each and 300GB of scsi disk for everything. this aint good when im trying to consolidate etc.

as things currently stand our hp stroage works can fit another 300GB in before we have to by a new drive enclosure. this is likely to be expensive and i cant justify it yet.... we are a small company.

however. we have nearly 2 terrabytes of storage going spare in a sata array we have.

we run esx server 3.5 and virtual center 2.5.

what i would like to know is if at least in theory if its possible to add into the virtual center this 2 terabyte sata storage so we have loads of disk space avaiblae for virtual servers?

if this is [possible i can upgrade the memory for a reletively cheap price and have an alright setup for what we need.

many many thanks for any replies.

[chill]

As long as your hardware falls in the supported category in the HCL, then you shouldn't have an issue.

SATA disks are now supported.

• SATA disk drives, plugged into dual SATA/SAS controllers, are supported for installing ESX Server 3 and for storing virtual machines on VMFS partitions.

• Ensure that your SATA drives are connected through supported SATA/SAS controllers:

• mptscsi_pcie - LSI1068E (LSISAS3442E)

• mptscsi_pcix - LSI1068 (SAS 5)

• aacraid_esx30 - IBM serveraid 8k SAS controller

• cciss - Smart Array P400/256 controller

• megaraid_sas-Dell PERC 5.0.1 controller

[Saltious]

Many thanks for your reply.

does anyone know how i actyually achieve adding in the disks to virtual center.

i cant find anywhere.

thanks.

[chill]

When using Virtual Centre, Highlight the server you want, select the configuration tab and then you will see the section for Storage. Click on Add Storage.

[Saltious]

thanks once again.

however, i cant add a new disk. it only lets me use what is already assigned for usage by vmware.

theres an option for raw device mapping but its greyed out... im guessing that could be useful if i new how to make it available?

cheers!

[chill]

Have you tried going into Storage Adapters and doing a rescan?

[Saltious]

hmmm... i wouldnt know where that was.

the sata disks are outr our san. these are now linked to the virtual hardware any way yet. they can in theory see each other through the network. i was hoping it was possible to use them like this...... although this is probably going to make for slow data storage....

[chill]

Do you have a San person there that can help you with this? The disks must be assigned to the servers through the SAN software first, then the ESX servers will be able to see the disks.