Newbie: How to manage storage on a SINGLE DISK machine (no iSCSI, no other drives)

[jimwillsher]

Hi, I'm about to make my first foray into vSphere. I will be installing onto a single disk NUC, with a 2TB M.2 drive.

What is the best way to handle storage? In an ideal world this is what I would want:

• ESXi (6.7) installed onto the drive
• Use the same M.2 drive to store my VMs
• Have a VM or a partition of that drive that can be shared by the VMs themselves, e.g. via SMB.

I won't have many VMs, just a couple of Windows servers and a Linux box. But there is a bunch of files that I want to be shared between the Windows box and the Linux box. Ideally I'd like these simply stored on the M.2 drive directly, but happy to put them into a separate VMDK if that makes sense.

I don't have any other drives or devices that can be used for storage.

Many thanks i advance for any advice or starter tips.

Jim

[Sreejesh_D]

Hi, welcome to the community!

The configuration you mentioned looks good for the lab. You can install ESXi on the disk and a partition of the same disk can be used as VMFS datastore for storing VMs/vmdks.

To share files between VMs there are multiple methods, as you said using nfs/smb is one of them. Pls refer this KB for more details VMware Knowledge Base

The key vSphere features like vMotion, HA, DRS etc require shared storage with more than one host. An ideal production environment will contain at least two hosts with shared storage or vSAN.

-SD [vExpert 14-19,VCIX6-NV&DCV,RHCE]

https://pingforinfo.com

https://twitter.com/sreejeshd

[jimwillsher]

Thank you yezdi that's excellent, and I really appreciate the quick reply.

As background, this will only ever be "lab". I currently have a Dell server at home running a few VMs - Windows server, Ubuntu for my music player etc. But it's power-hungry and very noisy, hence the move to a NUC. I've no experience of vSphere as I am used to hyperV, so  am looking forward to learning new things.

I'm still weighing up whether to run with "free" license or whether to purchase....I'll probably know more once I build my kit and begin the learning.

Thanks again for your help.

Jim

[Teddy092]

Hi jimwillsher and welcome

You should follow yezdi's advices but I just want to add a few things.

You have also the possibility to install ESXi on a usb drive that works great. I'm actually doing it on my own NUC.

And then you would dedicate your M.2 drive to your VMs.

If you want to go further and then install vCenter, create clusters and so on, there is what we call "Nested ESXi" which are virtual ESXi (a VM) that can be installed on top of your real ESXi server.

I let you check all of that on William Lam's blog which is great by the way

Here some info to help you understand and deploy a Nested ESXi: https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2015/12/deploying-nested-esxi-is-even-easier-now-with-the-esxi-virtu...

Here to download Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance: https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/nested-virtualization/nested-esxi-virtual-appliance

Enjoy and good luck