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On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:17:37 +0100 (BST) Gordon Henderson wrote: > On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Grant Sewell wrote: > > > 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. > > Er, OK. So you're running SBS in a VMWare thingy which is running > on-top of Linux, running on x86 hardware. No. I am running SBS in a virtual machine on VMWare ESXi. VMWare ESXi runs on the bare metal - it is not an "application" like VirtualBox. > Why aren't you running SBS natively on the hardware without the Linux > bit in the middle? There is no Linux bit in the middle, and the reason I am running SBS in a virtual machine is so I can also have a Linux virtual machine running along side it. Much and all as I *love* Windows, I'd rather trust as much as I can to the Linux virtual machine. :D > I'm sure there's a good reason though... (e.g. running more than one > SBS server and saving hardware?) > > Gordon ESXi *officially* is not a Linux system. This can be confusing since ESX (note it lacks the lowercase i) has a hypervisor (the same as ESXi) but also a RedHat based "management" system. ESXi lacks this "management" system. The ESXi system seems to look very much like a Linux system, same files in the same place, executables being listed as Linux ELF binaries, etc, but word from VMWare is that it is *not* a Linux system. *ahem* ESXi Hypervisor can have SSH enabled (which I have done). Watching the equivalent of "dmesg" when plugging in the USB drive is quite revealing. It recognises that it's a USB storage device but offers no way to mount the filesystem - even when you use the native tools to create an VMFS on there, it still won't mount it. Nor is there the ability to directly pass a USB device to a guest system. 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