ESX 4 - Mounted CIFS, Not showing up under Storage

[ralexgolden]

Hello, I'm attempting to mount a CIFS share on a ESX 4.0 host. The CIFS share exists on a SAN that is not licensed for NFS. I want to store the vmdk files on the SAN. The SAN will be mirrored off-site soon, thus my virtual machines will be backed up.

Basically I do not see the CIFS share under Storage in the VMWare vSphere Client.

I ran the following command.

mkdir /mnt/cifs

mount - t cifs //SANName/Sharename /mnt/cfis -o username=SANUSER,domain=ABC

It asked for a password.

When I type mount I can see it is correctly mounted.

I think I am missing a step.

[lamw · Accepted solution]

CIFS is not supported protocol for mounting your storage to run VMs, you can mount as you've noted using the Service Console but it will not be used to store VMs and hence it won't be seen by ESX host, only NFS, FC/iSCSI is supported.

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William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

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Twitter: @lamw

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[ralexgolden]

Double post

[ralexgolden]

Lamw, thank you for very much answering my question. I'm going to reach out to our SAN vendor and ask if they will license us for iSCSI or NFS.

[Apollos]

Hello ralexgolden.

This is a trick I've used just to get it to work. You are correct that you can not see it as a datastore.

umount /vmimages

mount - t cifs //SANName/Sharename /vmimages -o username=SANUSER,domain=ABC

Then go in to your VM, edit your CD-rom settings and select 'datastore iso file' and then browse... select 'vmimages'.

This will not survive a reboot though so I'm researching that now.

ESX mounts the local /vmimages folder by default and it shows as an option under datastore iso file when selected.

Regards

[lamw]

Neat trick, you can easily create a new start up script and place it under /etc/rc3.d/ OR add an entry under /etc/rc.local and it should umount the default vmimages and mount up the cifs volume. I would probably recommend copying the directory structure to the new cifs volumes, hopefully this will not break VMware Tool installs which relies on the path of this volume.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

Twitter: @lamw

Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)

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