Connecting to physical host disks from VM

vmware-serverwindows-server-2008

I used VMware Converter to do a P2V of my server.

My server had 3 HDDs: C: D: E: (SATA/IDE)

I only included the C: drive (boot) in the image, because I had not intended to need to activate this VM – just access the files.

After doing a P2V I reinstalled the host OS on to C:.

It turns out that I now need to run the old server as a VM… the problem is drives D: and E: are not accessible, but they are needed in order for the server to function correctly.

How can I access the physical drives D: and E: on my host from my VM in a transparent way? I cannot used network shares because things like SQL server on the VM will not let you have the data store on a network share.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Jack

Edit:
I am using Vmware Server 2.x (latest from site), Windows Server 2008, and SATA/IDE discs.

Best Answer

I take it that you don't want to / can't physically attach the "D:" and "E:" "drives" to the server computer hosting the VM.

If this is goign to be a short-term thing, the easiest thing I think you could do would be to install an iSCSI target onto a computer that can host these disks and export them as iSCSI targets. On your VM, you could install an iSCSI initiator, connect to those targets, and assign them the proper drive letters. Do note that I'm talking about actually loading the initiator inside the VM-- not in the hypervisor itself. The iSCSI traffic would be coming from the VM (and, as such, you might need to make a physical network connection to create a dedicated iSCSI network and then expose that connections as a dedicated virtual NIC in the VM).

If this is going to be a long-term thing I would convert the disks to VMDK disks and be done with the physical disks. If you get the whole iSCSI thing going you could just add some virtual disks to the VM in addition to the iSCSI targets and copy the contents from the iSCSI targets to the virtual disks.

What you use for an iSCSI target shouldn't matter too much, so long as it can present entire disks as targets w/o requiring any changes to the disks. I think Openfiler can do that, but I'm not 100% sure.

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