Mounting Drives onESXi 5.5 Server - can they be mounted outside of ESXi?

[grepawking]

I'm wondering if I can mount drives on a Linux VM that bypass the ESXi hypervisor. Basically I don't want to run the vmfs on my new RAID array so that I can transfer these drives to another machine w/o ESXi on it.

I want my Linux VM to be able to recognize the array without it being added as a datastore on the esxi interface.

I'm running ESXi 5.5 BTW.

Is this possible?

 

[Dahak]

Yes, you have to enable passthrough (hardware support required) and then add the card to the linux vm and it will act like if you installed linux on a physical box

 

[tomt4535]

A raw device map might work too. Not sure if it works with local storage or not, but a RDM bypasses VMFS and presents the raw disk to the OS so you can put whatever formatting you want on it.

 

[yinan]

An RDM would be a better and easier way to go. VTd support is more limited to server class motherboards mostly. You can however enable RDM for local disks by setting and advanced setting on the host:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1017704