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I currently have a server running ESXi 5 and have 2x 2TB on the server. ESXi is installed to a SD card and two datastores are created (one for each drive).

I was wondering if there's anyway to share those two datastore so I can map them from Windows?

Tom O'Connor
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YTKColumba
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You cannot share the datastore from ESXi directly. You'll need to create a VM, allocate disk to it, and then share the storage out from there.

As an aside, those two 2TB drives you have really ought to be configured in a RAID 1 set. You're asking to put yourself (and those who are dependent on this server) in a world of hurt if you leave them as standalone disks.

EEAA
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  • I will probably add more disks and configure it as RAID 5 or something later on, I was just wondering if there's anyway to share the Datastore...Thanks for the help – YTKColumba Dec 30 '11 at 04:56
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    "Later" is as good as "never". Do it now before you get VMs running on the host. Things will be *much* more difficult to change when this machine is in production. Trust me - not using RAID, especially in a virtualized environment is false economy and completely inexcusable. – EEAA Dec 30 '11 at 04:57
  • @YTKColumba If you're going to make an array later on, make it RAID 6. Rebuild times for RAID 5 are making the chance of an unrecoverable second error extremely likely for large HDD sizes. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162 – Tom O'Connor Dec 30 '11 at 11:25