Using a NAS drive as a datastore?

[edisoninfo]

Physical host has 4 gigabit ports only 2 are being used at the moment. I would like to take one of the unused ports and plug a Western Digital NAS drive into it for backing up to. Is that possible and is there a document on how to do it?

If it can not be connected as an actual datastore (like iSCSI or something) can I at least creat it's own private gigabit network so backup traffic only goes out that network card to the NAS drive and not out over the general network?

[chriswahl]

If you connect the NAS to a host and mount it as a datastore, just make sure that you use a vmkernel port with the same subnet as your NAS box. So a vmkernel with 192.168.0.1/24 would connect to a NAS box with an IP of 192.168.0.2/24 (example). This will prevent any need for routing.

If you were going to do a non-datastore approach, I suppose you could dual home a VM that is doing the backup and put one of the connections onto a portgroup that was tied to the uplink going to the NAS box. I would be surprised if you were using a NAS box that doesn't support either iSCSI or NFS, they are quite common today.

Cheers.

[edisoninfo]

Apparently this Western Digital MyBookLive does not support NFS, or at least I can not get it to work. All kinds of web posts saying yes/no so who knows.

All I want to do now is be able to use the Gigabit interface so backups run faster and are issolated from the main network.

This is what I have tried but am unsuccessful so far:

(Main network is 192.168.1.x)

Manually assigned 192.168.1.5 to the WD backup drive

Plugged the WD into one of the unused ports on the host

In vSphere Client, removed that NIC from the pool

Created a new vmKernel and added that NIC into it

Assigned that vmKernel an ip of 192.168.1.13

In the one Windows Guest that runs Veeam, tried to ping the WD drive, no luck

Added a vmNetwork

Again tried to ping, no luck

I know I am missing something very simple but can not figure it out. I am happy to read any kind of manuals or white papers but have not found what I am looking for.

[iw123]

Hi,

If your NAS doesnt support either iSCSI or NFS you wont be able to attach it directly to your host and use it as a datastore. If you are trying to set it up so that you can access the storage from a guest virtual machine, then you could do that by creating a new vswitch on your host, connected to a nic which is in turn on the same network as your WD device. You can then add a vnic your guest to a port group on that new vswitch. Give that vnic an IP in the same subnet range as your NAS device and you should be able to communicate with it.

[edisoninfo]

I "think" I did the first steps properly. What I did not do yet is go into the guest itself and add a new nic to it. I presume this new nic and virtual network should be on a different subnet from the main network?