Jason Perlow writes for ZDNet.com a respectable online magazine. Jason wrote an “excellent” article about VMFS-3 and the fact that it was so hard to copy files from and to these volumes. (“VMware bad / Microsoft good” is the tone of the article.) Jason could only get the trick done by creating an NFS share, mounting it and then copy the data. He even experienced ESX crashes due to storage and network contention problems. (First time I ever heard this and it makes me wonder what kind of environment we are talking about here.) Scott Lowe already responded and at first I did not wanted to respond but it started itching again when one of my colleagues reminded me of this article today.
In the past I’ve used various methods to copy files to and from a VMFS-3 volume but after reading Jason’s article I started doubting myself. Did I really attach a USB drive, mounted the FAT32 partition and copied files or am I delusional? Is my vBrain playing tricks on me? No, I’m pretty sure it did work in the past. Other options I’ve used in the past are of course Veeam’s excellent tool FastSCP(Jason, try Google the next time!) and tools like WinSCP. Another option, and most definitely the best option when importing VM’s of course is the freely available VMware Converter, which everyone who is familiar with VMware probably knows and used at one point in time.
So lets repeat the options mentioned to do this simple task:
- Mounting a FAT32 formatted USB Drive
- FastSCP
- WinSCP
- VMware Converter
- VMware vSphere/vCenter Client
I guess anyone can use option 2 to 5 but option 1 might be a bit more difficult for some as according to Jason it is impossible to mount a FAT32 formatted USB Drive. Hold on here we go and I promise it is going to be a bumpy ride:
- Logon to ESX Host and insert USB Drive
- Create a folder to mount the USB Drive to:
mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
- Figure out which device to mount:
dmesg | tail
- Mount the FAT32 formatted USB Drive:
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbdrive -t vfat
- Do your magic
Just to make sure it worked I copied /etc/vmware/esx.conf to the USB Drive. Now lets copy the data to the VMFS volume…. hey that’s weird it works flawlessly. No bumps at all. I don’t know what went wrong in Jason’s situation / environment but ESX is perfectly capable of mounting FAT32 formatted USB Devices. Hey, if you want to you can even mount NTFS devices, although this is unsupported. But why take the difficult route? Why not hook your disks up to a workstation and install the free VMware Converter and import your VMs the easy way without worrying about mounting drives… Next time before you try to bash VMFS / VMware you might want to get your facts straight. Oh and by the way, it’s VMware and not VMWare.
You are right, WinSCP is still an option but compared to the other available tools, it’s very slow which is why I don’t use it any more. Nonetheless, great tool which I got a TON of use out of in the ESX 2.x days and somewhat into the VI3 days.
Keep rocking your excellent VMWare blog Duncan!
It’s also possible (read only) to use the open source java mounter http://code.google.com/p/vmfs/
here is an example :
http://x505.free.fr/img/jvmfs.jpg
I don’t get it also! Why would someone connect a USB hard drive to an ESX server at the first place? It’s not even possible in certain environments where no one would normally be allowed to enter a datacenter with a USB peripheral!
Beside what Duncan said about the VMware converter, why not use the native vSphere client to simply browse the datastore and download/upload even entire folders not just individual VM files.
I, too, was scratching my head on this one when I read it. Converter or the integrated Datastore browser seemed like the obvious choices to me. I suspect that Jason was under so much pressure to get everything up that the first solution he came up with was the ONLY one he considered.
1. Breathe.
2. Take stock of your options.
and, as Duncan mentioned,
3. Google is your friend.
What’s even cooler is to tar the needed files from and to your usb disk.. (e.g. tar: tar cfvz [files or dir] [targetfile].tar.gz untar: tar xvfz [file])
Ideal way to ‘throw’ around your vm’ed servers & templates across systems … fast and effective. !Just keep a good mind to what you are typing..!
As for tools, Veeams backup solution rocks!
Agreed. Really… There are always more options than cats to skin. (Think I got that backwards, but alas).
Easiest way is to connect the USB drive to your management Workstation (under XP, Vista….) and start the Datastore browser from the VI client.
Send the Files to your Datastore and rigt click the VMX file to register your VM.
No external tools are needed. Just the VI client.
The point of his article was to paint VMFS and VMware as proprietary. Give me a break! If that’s proprietary, then what is CSV?
(http://www.vcritical.com/2009/09/hands-off-that-csv/ <– 90+ passionate comments when I simply pointed out a couple of aspects of CSV.)
Nice post, Duncan!
Eric
agree Eric, that was his point. but no way I’m going to start an argument about Microsoft / NTFS being open. I’ve heard a lot of weird stuff lately but this goes beyond anything.
Is mounting a USB device with Fat32 and NTFS also possible in ESXi?
Thank God the first confusing blog post wasn’t about connecting a USB peripheral to print “top” results from ESX Console!
Even if USB Storage IS supported, as Hany Michael said, you can’t criticize a product meant for DataCenter enviroments of how well it behaves under SOHO circumstances. On top of that, VMware has many tools available (eg. Converter) for people who know where to look for.
6. rcli
NFS share and WinSCP are what I use for this every day. USB isn’t always an option since the DC is remote and I am not always in there, but it’s good to fall back on.