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  • 1.  ESX 4 - Mounted CIFS, Not showing up under Storage

    Posted May 11, 2010 03:39 PM

    Hello, I'm attempting to mount a CIFS share on a ESX 4.0 host. The CIFS share exists on a SAN that is not licensed for NFS. I want to store the vmdk files on the SAN. The SAN will be mirrored off-site soon, thus my virtual machines will be backed up.

    Basically I do not see the CIFS share under Storage in the VMWare vSphere Client.

    I ran the following command.

    mkdir /mnt/cifs

    mount - t cifs //SANName/Sharename /mnt/cfis -o username=SANUSER,domain=ABC

    It asked for a password.

    When I type mount I can see it is correctly mounted.

    I think I am missing a step.



  • 2.  RE: ESX 4 - Mounted CIFS, Not showing up under Storage
    Best Answer

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted May 11, 2010 03:56 PM

    CIFS is not supported protocol for mounting your storage to run VMs, you can mount as you've noted using the Service Console but it will not be used to store VMs and hence it won't be seen by ESX host, only NFS, FC/iSCSI is supported.

    =========================================================================

    William Lam

    VMware vExpert 2009

    VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:

    Twitter: @lamw

    VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

    VMware Developer Community

    If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".



  • 3.  RE: ESX 4 - Mounted CIFS, Not showing up under Storage

    Posted May 11, 2010 04:16 PM

    Double post



  • 4.  RE: ESX 4 - Mounted CIFS, Not showing up under Storage

    Posted May 11, 2010 04:16 PM

    Lamw, thank you for very much answering my question. I'm going to reach out to our SAN vendor and ask if they will license us for iSCSI or NFS.



  • 5.  RE: ESX 4 - Mounted CIFS, Not showing up under Storage

    Posted Jun 11, 2010 04:23 PM

    Hello ralexgolden.

    This is a trick I've used just to get it to work. You are correct that you can not see it as a datastore.

    umount /vmimages

    mount - t cifs //SANName/Sharename /vmimages -o username=SANUSER,domain=ABC

    Then go in to your VM, edit your CD-rom settings and select 'datastore iso file' and then browse... select 'vmimages'.

    This will not survive a reboot though so I'm researching that now.

    ESX mounts the local /vmimages folder by default and it shows as an option under datastore iso file when selected.

    Regards



  • 6.  RE: ESX 4 - Mounted CIFS, Not showing up under Storage

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jun 11, 2010 04:33 PM

    Neat trick, you can easily create a new start up script and place it under /etc/rc3.d/ OR add an entry under /etc/rc.local and it should umount the default vmimages and mount up the cifs volume. I would probably recommend copying the directory structure to the new cifs volumes, hopefully this will not break VMware Tool installs which relies on the path of this volume.

    =========================================================================

    William Lam

    VMware vExpert 2009,2010

    VMware scripts and resources at:

    Twitter: @lamw

    Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)

    Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl

    VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

    VMware Developer Community

    If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".