Creating a VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) datastore from a USB drive refers to using an external storage device (usually a USB drive) to create a VMFS datastore, which can then be used to store the data of virtual machines. This allows you to expand the storage capacity of your virtualization server environment without the need to purchase additional storage devices. VMFS datastore is a storage area used in a virtualization environment, allowing a server to manage a large number of virtual machines and store their data on a storage array.
In this article, I will show you how to use an external USB drive to make a datastore containing virtual machine data on an ESXi server. The goal is to provide more hard drive space for the ESXi.
Follow the steps below to create a VMFS datastore from a USB drive on ESXi 7.0
Table of contents
1. Enable SSH Access
Review this article for how to enable SSH on ESXi
2. Turn off passthrough for USB drives
By default on ESXi, any USB drive plugged into the server will automatically enable passthrough for the virtual machine. Therefore, I need to turn off the passthrough feature for the USB drive that I want to use as a VMFS datastore.
Login SSH to the ESXi server and check the list of usb devices
esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list
Record the Bus, Dev, VendorId, ProductId parameters of the USB drive to use in the command below to disable the passthrough function.
esxcli hardware usb passthrough device disable -d 1:3:bc2:5032Check the list again, you will see that the Enabled parameter of the USB drive has changed to False.
3. Determine the codename of the USB drive
Next, it is necessary to determine the codename of the USB drive, set in the format mpx.vmhbaX:CX:TX:LX by ESXi.
Type the following command to see the list of hard drives
vdq -q
You can immediately identify the USB you just plugged in with the Device Identifier code mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0because the first one is the built-in NVMe SSD.
4. Create VMFS datastore from USB drive
Use the following command to set the partition for the USB drive, and create the VFMS datastore. You need to edit the DEVICE_PATH entry to correspond to the codename of the USB drive specified in step 3.
DEVICE_PATH="/vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0"
partedUtil mklabel ${DEVICE_PATH} msdos
END_SECTOR=$(eval expr $(partedUtil getptbl ${DEVICE_PATH} | tail -1 | awk '{print $1 " \* " $2 " \* " $3}') - 1)
partedUtil "setptbl" "${DEVICE_PATH}" "gpt" "1 2048 ${END_SECTOR} AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0"
vmkfstools -C vmfs6 -b 1m -S USB-Data ${DEVICE_PATH}:1
5. Check Datastore on ESXi
If done smoothly, go back to the management page of ESXi, you will see an additional datastore called USB-Data.
The above method has only been tested on ESXi 7.0U3. If you are using ESXi 6.7 or below, you can try this method: How to add a USB Disk as VMFS Datastore in ESXi 6.7 – IT-REACT
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