hot plug sata to ESXi 5 server

Question

Is it possible to hot plug an eSATA drive to an ESXi 5 server?

I'm exploring backup solutions and hoping to hot add a datastore, copy my VM's over, then hotunplug.

This doesn't answer your question, but you can hot add USB drives. — joeqwerty, Oct 02 '13 at 21:51
No - hoping to backup the set of files which comprise the VM. — TSG, Oct 03 '13 at 03:34
That is not the right way to back them up. You should really use vsphere and script it; there is an API for that. — Falcon Momot, Sep 06 '15 at 00:03
Watch out for non-quiesced VM images. What you're backing up may very well be corrupt if you haven't quiesced the guest itself and then frozen the guest filesystem during backup (snapshots of some kind typically take care of this). This is what the vSphere API an guest tools are for, as Falcon Momot mentioned. — Spooler, Sep 16 '16 at 06:25

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 06 '13 at 19:42

1

It does! I just used this feature recently.

answered Oct 06 '13 at 19:42

Zulakis

A bit more detail would improve this answer – Dave M Oct 06 '13 at 20:30
Well, I plugged the hard drive in and clicked the "check for new storage devices" button in the storage configuration. That's it. – Zulakis Oct 07 '13 at 08:32
Anybody else tested this? Please upvote the answer if it worked. – P Marecki Feb 06 '14 at 09:39
If it doesn't work, the sata controller on your motherboard probably doesn't support hotplug. – Zulakis Feb 06 '14 at 14:07
I could not reproduce this (and my hd controller supports hot swap). I saw errors in the VM syslog, but no new drives available. W – TSG Feb 07 '14 at 21:36

1 Answers1