Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

ReadyNAS units that have current firmware support the NFS file system needed to be accessed as a storage device by VMWare’s ESX & ESXi server.

The process is simple in the end – though there is almost no help in forums to do this.

Using VMWare Infrastructure Client, attach to the ESXi server. Under the configuration tab, there is a link in the upper right corner labeled “Add Storage…”.

The add storage wizard comes up; select Network File System and click next.

For server, type in the IP address of the ReadyNAS, such as 192.168.1.15 (or whatever your unit’s IP is)

For folder, type in / followed by sharename, such as /Data

Name the datastore and click Next, then finish. If all is good, it will be added in a couple of seconds.

That’s it! Your ReadyNAS is now a storage device for VMWare ESX (i) server.

The other day I was installing VMWare ESX server onto a new Dell PowerEdge 2900 server and when I installed the client operating system, Windows Server 2008 64bit, I received this error message:

0xC000035a

Attempt to load 64 bit application; CPU is not compatible with 64 bit mode.

This struck me as very odd for a brand new Dell Server with 12GB RAM and VMWare ESX. Google, however, came to the rescue and I found out that one must go into the DELL Server BIOS and change a CPU setting to “allow virtualization”.

Once that was done, Windows Server 2008 installed just fine.

I’m starting to get a lot of demand for server virtualization and am using VMWare to do it.

One snag that took a bit to overcome was trying to copy a file from a USB stick to the VMWare ESX 3.5 server via the console.

When I plugged in the USB stick, the server recognized it and displayed a bunch of verbiage on the screen. Unfortunately, it doesn’t return to the command prompt when finished, you have to press [Enter]. Wasted a few minutes waiting before I figured that out.

One of the things it will tell you is what device name it has given the USB drive. In this case it was “/dev/sdd” (no quotes).

So in order to mount the drive I had to create a mount point

mkdir /mnt/usbkey

“usbkey” was arbitrary on my part.

Then, I had to figure out that I needed to append a “1″ to the device name to actually mount it:

mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/usbkey -t vfat

the “-t vfat” I found via a google search. I was then able to copy the file with the cp command.

Linux is pretty intuitive, eh?