Open Source How to add physical drive to VM on exsi 5.0

As above? Anyone know how todo this, as far as I can see I can I ly format the drives onto datastore and them create virtual disks and add them?
Anyone shed any light!?

Cheers in advanced

 

What you are trying to do is called an rdm disk. Raw Device Mapping. You should be able to do it from the VM settings. Add new hardware and choose disk. You Have the option of creating a new vmdk disk, using an existing vmdk disk or using a physical disk. The physical disk will need to be unformatted with no partitions at all.

 

no i wanted to added a physical disk with data already on it :/
perhaps i wont use ESXI after all :/

 

What's your end goal?

 

http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/

I have a 1.5TB hard drive for ESXi and VM, and 10 data drives directly mapped using above steps to my WHS2011 virtual machine.