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On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:43:44 +0100 (BST) Gordon Henderson wrote: > On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Grant Sewell wrote: > > > What's going on is this - we have a Windows SBS 2008 virtual machine > > running inside VMWare ESXi. VMWare ESXi is an interesting product > > but lacks the ability to show physically attached USB drives to any > > of the guest OSes. The original plan was for SBS 2008 to backup to > > the USB drives in-turn, so Monday would be on Disk 1, Tuesday on > > Disk 2, Wednesday on Disk 1, etc, etc. Installing SBS 2008 inside > > VMWare ESXi, however, put the kybosh on that plan. > > > > So now we have the SBS 2008 machine performing regular backups over > > the network to my machine which is setup to share USB Disk 1 with > > SAMBA. Since the only things that was mandatory was that one of the > > disks be taken off-site every night, I decided that Disk 1 should > > be the primary backup drive and Disk 2 should be a duplicate of it > > that can be taken off-site every night. > > OK... Now, I know little of VMware, and it's like. but couldn't the > VMWare host be the one running samba, and it mount the USB drives - > with the windows VM seeing the samba share via the "network" > connection between the VM and the host? That would be very nice, but not an option (yet). VMWare ESXi is just like ESX, except that they seem to have taken out the majority of the useful features. It is essentially a hypervisor without a proper controlling system. I have enabled SSH access to it so I can see what's going on and modify what I need to, but it is very limited. When a USB drive is plugged in, it registers as a device fine... but there's no way to mount the filesystem on there. There is no in-built SAMBA and, call me lazy if you like, I don't particularly want to spend a vast amount of time trying to get SAMBA to compile on another machine so I can transfer it over to the ESXi Hypervisor system so I can share devices which I can't access anyway. *takes deep breath* Grant. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html