ESXi 5.0 Add New Hard Drive, additional DataStore

Posted on Saturday, February 14, 2015


I have an ESXi 5.0 server running at my house, see http://www.whiteboardcoder.com/p/esxi-server.html,  which runs on a box with two hard drives, a 1.5 TiB and a 2.0 TiB.  I really need to build an entire new ESXi box, but I also have a wife, two kids, and right now a new ESXi box is way down on the list.   (Besides I need to wait at least 6 more months for ESXi 6.0 to be available and proven in the wild)

In the meantime, I bought a new hard drive a 4.0 TiB Western Digital WD40EZRX, which should help me limp along until then.  







Turn Everything Off


 Make sure to back up anything that needs backing up.
Go into each machine and power it off (A little anal, but safer)





Then open up VSphere and Turn off all your virtual machines.  Select the machine and power it off.






Right click on the server and select Shut Down.


Power down your physical server and install the additional hard drive.






Bring it all back up


Bring the server back up and make sure all your VMs are working as intended.





Create a Datastore


Now it's time to turn the new Hard Drive into a new Datastore.




Open up VSphere and select the ESXi server.








Open the Configuration Tab.










Click on Storage then click on "Add Storage"










Click Next.





There is the new hard drive.







Select the hard drive and click next.







Click Next.






Click Next.





Give it a name, I called mine datastore3,  click next






Click Next.








It's Ready to go start the set up.  Click Finish







In the Recent Tasks section of the VSphere interface you should see the datastore being created.






It did not take very long < 10 seconds.








And there is my third datastore  J






5 comments:

  1. Hi, thanks for very easy howto steps. It really helped me a lot :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi,

      For me its not working -we are not able to create data store

      Delete
    2. we are plan to add one more 1TB hard disk -after rebooting still not able to create data store -Hard disk is not visible.Any per-request we need to at host side

      Delete
  2. Hi. I have an old 80gb ide hard drive which I'd rather recycle by adding it to my esxi machine. This ide drive is fully recognized by bios. But when log into vsphere, it doesn't appear in the list of available hard drives. If fact, tried to install esxi on it, but esxi installer don't recognize this ide drive, only the sata one I'm actually using.

    If I plug in a sata 500gb drive with bad sectors, then it does appear in the list of devices, but of course I dont want to use it beacuse it has bad sectors.

    So, esxi does run on sata drives ony?
    Any idea?
    Thanks in advance!

    ReplyDelete