ESXi vSphere Adding Second HD (Win-7)

I recently bought an apple TV.   I like the feature where you can share your iTunes library with it from another computer, in order to access the movies from that computer to watch on the Apple TV.   But, to make this work you need to have your computer running.  

I have an ESXi 5 server  running 24x7 in my house that has a Windows 7 OS running on it.  Long story short I did a few test with iTunes on this virtual Win7 box with the apple TV and it was a success.  Now I want to add a second Virtual hard drive to this machine in order to put lots of my movies on this machine to share with the appleTV.

With that all in mind here are the steps I took to add a second hard drive to my virtual machine running Win7 on an ESXi server…

First open up vSphere Client and login to your ESXi 5 server.

Now select the virtual server you want to add an extra hard drive to and click on Edit Virtual Machine Settings.

Click on the Add button.

Select Hard Disk and click Next.

 

Select Create a new virtual Disk and click Next.

Set the Disk size and click Next.  (I set mine to 300GiB)

Here you can select which drive you want this to be.  I used the default which just selects the next available slot and click next.

Click Finish.

Now you can see the extra hard drive.  Click OK.

Right click on the server and select “Open Console”

Login to the Windows 7 system

Click on the Windows button and select Control Panel

Click on System and Security

Click on Administrative Tools

Double click on Computer management

Click on Disk management

This Window will pop up click OK

Now you can see the 300 GiB hard drive that was added to it.

Right click on it and select New Simple Volume.

A wizard starts up.   Click next.

Leave the default Volume size and click Next

Select the drive name you want to assign to this and click Next.

Give the drive a name and click Next.

Click Finish

Give it a few seconds to format.

Now you have a second drive

iTunes Setup

For those interested, here is my iTunes setup on the Win7 machine.  Mainly I needed to move the location of the iTunes Library to the new folder.

Click on the icon in the far upper right then click on Preferences.

Select the Advanced tab and see where your iTunes media is currently located.  In my case it C:\Users\patman\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media

Go to the iTunes folder and copy the iTunes Media folder to the new D drive

After it has copied all the files open up go to iTunes

Open up the preference and select the Advanced tab.  Then click on Change

Select the iTunes Media folder on the D drive

Click OK

Finally quit and restart iTunes

References