Hi folks, I'm stuck on an installation and could use some help.
I've installed vSphere Hypervisor onto my home server with the intent of virtualizing Windows Home Server 2011 (this is an upgrade from an older version of WHS that was installed natively). So I created a VM for WHS 2011, installed it, and everything there is fine. But how do I define my four data drives to the VM so it can see them? From googling around, it looks like there's a complicated, manual process for ESXi that involves SSH'ing into the VMWare server and creating some directories, then calling a tool that creates sort of a shortcut for each drive. But one article I found indicated this may not be totally reliable and isn't recommended for production data?! Not sure if that applied to the current version or an older one, though.
Is this the only way to make the data drives available to a VM? My hardware is just a consumer Gigabyte motherboard with on-board SATA controllers. SATA-0 is the boot drive with vSphere installed, SATA-1 through 4 are two-terabyte drives filled with data. What I *thought* could be done was to virtualize Windows Home Server and then have it access the data pool as physical drives -- not as virtual drives. Is this possible/reliable? vSphere sees the drives, I just don't see a clickable option to pass them through. I'm told Hyper-V does this easily, but I chose vSphere because it has a GUI management console (and without Windows 8 you'd have to manage Hyper-V from command line).
Thanks for any help! I'm dead in the water until I can figure this out.