otispresley

The speed of the USB stick really doesn't matter much with ESXi, because it loads everything into memory during boot. It will take some time to boot either way, but the system will perform exactly the same once it is up and running.

I always prefer to have the OS and applications on separate drives, so I would do #2. You will get the best performance that way.

ESXi unfortunately does not support USB drives. There is a very limited set of USB devices that it supports for passthrough. You can install ESXi itself onto a USB device.

Yes, you can do that, but performance will become quite slow once you get around 3 or more VMs on there due to the increased competition for storage resources against that disk, unless you use an SSD. You can try and see how you like it. If you do decide to later switch to a RAID or SSD for your virtual machines, then just shutdown your VMs, remove the VMs from the inventory, move the folders and files to another datastore, and then add them (using the VMX files) back to the inventory.

I have the exact same case and card, and also run ESXi 5.5. It will use the entire hard drive you choose. There will be several partitions. What it does not need for the OS, it will use as the Local Datastore. I installed mine on a 60GB SSD and only use the Local Datastore for storing the ISO files I use for installing the OS for my VMs. I use 3x 240 GB SSD in a RAID 0 for my VMs (VM Datastore) and use a great free script called GhettoVCB for backing up my VMs (Backup Datastore) to a 1TB HDD in an eSATA dock. The VM Datastore and Backup Datastore have to be created manually after install and can be named whatever you want. Using the ESXi Windows Client, select your server and go to the Configuration tab and choose Storage. I put all my SSDs inside the case so I can have the full 20 HDDs in the front for DrivePool. I have passed these disks through to my WS2012E VM for DrivePool since my disks are on 2 separate controllers, one of which is also used for my OS and VM Datastore disks. If you have separate controllers dedicated for DrivePool, then you can just pass the entire controller(s) through to the VM; this results in faster VM boot times. Refer to this post about how to get SMART data in DrivePool with ESXi, It also tells you how to pass your HDDs through. Read these instructions if you want to use PCI passthrough. I hope this helps!

This is so very true. I switched my main PC to a NUC and ordered this external LG Blu-Ray drive that is not riplocked. It costs more than the internal options, but I have been very happy with it. I have successfully patched riplocked drives in the past, but it is risky.

It does not look like Plex rips your DVD's, but this guide did come up in a lot of places in a Google search: http://hanycam-hd-clips-ingesting.overblog.com/2014/03/plex-dvd-ripper-backup-dvd-dvd-iso-video-ts-folder-to-plex-media-server.html

Just to add on here, you should be aware that transcoding the video to another format other than the native format will cause the quality of the video to be less than the original. One exception is taking it to MKV format, which is really just repackaging the unaltered video, audio and subtitle streams into a different container. I chose to preserve the quality of my videos by just removing the unwanted streams and repacking them back into their native container, which is VOB for DVD and M2TS for Blu-Ray. This uses less space than backing up the entire disc but requires more space than transcoding them to another format. The size of the output file varies depending on the length and quality of the video. My VOB files are typically between 3 and 7 GB each, and my M2TS files are generally between 15 and 45 GB each. There are a few programs I use for this. I am on a Windows machine, so I bought a lifetime subscription to AnyDVD HD, which is a tool that runs in the background and decrypts the disc when you insert it into the drive. It is costly but well worth it, because it just works and is updated frequently. For ripping my DVD discs, I use the old but free program DVD Shrink without compression. For ripping my Blu-Ray discs, I use the free tool tsMuxer. As far as the legality goes, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is what governs the legality of these things. Originally, it was legal to make 1 backup copy of your DVD or Blu-Ray discs, but it was illegal to break the encryption to do so. The DMCA was later amended to allow the encryption to be broken for research purposes.

I use AllwaySync, which works really great. It preserves time stamps, downloads the file to a temp location until complete, has 2-way and 1-way sync, and allows you to run multiple jobs with easy to use filters and automatic synchronization. This is an excerpt from the license agreement for the free version. In the past, I had tried RoboCopy, which worked well but did not do well when network connectivity was temporarily lost...even with the restart option. My experience with Bittorrent Sync was horrible with an early beta version, and I ended up losing some time stamp data and even lost some files because of it.

Very nice, glad it worked! I will pretend that the next beer I drink is from you.

I actually had the same issue after the most recent Scanner update and had to do it in the UI. It was the same config file I had been using forever. I assumed that the file was no longer supported and did not investigate further since the settings are now in the UI, so I do not know whether the file was not importing or whether some of the options just were not being read properly.

All the advanced options are now in the UI and no longer use your old config file. Go to Settings > Advanced settings and troubleshooting, then click the Configuration Properties tab, scroll down to Direct I/O, check Unsafe and click OK. It should take effect after you have restarted the Stablebit Scanner service.

Have you tried the Windows Server Solutions Troubleshooter? http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Utilities

That is correct. Since pass-through does not alter the disk in any way, you can pass-through existing pooled disks to a Virtual Machine with DrivePool installed and still have all your data and have the drives automatically form a pool.

From the VMware side of things, why would you use VMware Workstation rather than ESXi? Is it just because you want to use Windows Server as the base OS, or is there another reason? The reason I ask is because of the difference between Software and Bare Metal Hypervisors. With Workstation, you are using the Windows drivers to communicate with your system hardware. This causes a performance hit. Exactly how much impact depends on how powerful your system is. Also, it would be competing for system resources with Windows Server processes that have nothing to do with Virtualization. A Bare Metal Hypervisor contains the drivers to communicate directly with your system hardware and runs only processes that are necessary for Virtualization and management of the system. ESXi is such a product, as well as the server role in Windows Server. There is also a Hyper-V core version that is free and only has the components of Windows Server necessary to run and manage Hyper-V. I am just laying out options for you. Personally, I use ESXi on my server and run Windows Server 2012 Essentials in a VIrtual Machine. The disks used for DrivePool are passed through to it. The pass-through feature in ESXi is a bit different than it is in Hyper-V. With ESXi, you have to uncheck the RdmFilter.HbaIsShared setting under Advance Settings in the Software configuration of the host. After that, any physical disk you add to the system will be available for pass-through to a VM as a Raw Device Mapping (RDM). This does not format the disk, and these disks cannot be part of a VM backup using the free script ghettoVCB. Having passed through disks also prevents you from being able to take a memory snapshot of the VM. These are just some things you should consider. Virtualization can be as complex or as simple as you want...it all depends on what features you want to use and what virtualization product you are using.

In my experience, the dashboard notifications never identify which disk it is. I can only see that in the email notifications or by looking through all the disks in the Scanner UI.

Good to hear! I am glad all is working now.

I would say that looks very normal if you are not using the Disk Space Equalizer plugin, which is a separate download. This is my order for balancers, and my data is equally distributed across all disks. The File Placement Limiter, also a separate download, allows prevent Duplicated and/or Unduplicated data from being place on individual disks, which is good when you have a disk that is on its way out and you don't trust it with duplicated data.

Yes, I did have to enable "UnsafeDirectIO" in Scanner, but I am also running it as a VM in ESXi with all the disks passed through.

Here are the search results on Newegg for all mini-SAS cards with 4 ports, which means that you can do 16 drives with the breakout cables. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007607%20600112098&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20 I have the cheapest one in the list (LSI 9201-16i), which has worked great for me. It has no RAID and just connects drives. DrivePool and Scanner work well with it, and I get S.M.A.R.T. data in Scanner. If you want to go with a card that only supports 8 drives, there are plenty of options. I would just advise going with a well-known brand, such as HighPoint or LSI. You can also search the forums where similar questions have been answered before to determine some more specific options.

If you are interested in drive pooling on Linux, then check out Greyhole. This is used for storage pooling in Amahi too. It is a set of local PHP scripts. I tried it out one time, around 3 years ago, and ended up losing some data with it. It is nowhere near what DrivePool is in Windows, so try it at your own risk. I much prefer using DrivePool.

If everything stored in the pool is duplicated, then you should be able to do as you describe and not lose any data. I hope by "combined into one large drive" you mean that you have pooled them using DrivePool so that the DrivePool UI shows all 8 of your individual disks. Duplication only works if DrivePool sees multiple disks in the pool.

The closest thing to this is the Prevent Drive Overfill balancing plugin where you can set what max percentage or minimum free space to fill drive to, but it applied to all drives and does not allow different settings for different drives.

@aron, you will be better off getting support in the VMware forums as we are not ESXi experts here, and this has nothing to do with Stablebit products. What I do know is that the command you have issued is a list of partitions, so this is one device with 8 partitions on it and is the disk you have ESXi installed on. It could be that your other disks are not partitioned and formatted yet or your controller is not presenting the disks properly...not really sure. I see that your controller does appear on the compatibility list, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SMART data is supported for it in the product.

You may also want to check your router logs to see if there have been failed login attempts there. If your router supports Access Lists or has a built-in firewall, you can add a deny statement for any suspect IP address you find in the router or WHS logs, and they will no longer be able to reach your devices. My router supports RADIUS with accounting, so I use my WS2012E with the NAP role to authenticate users via RADIUS. This way, I can also see failed login attempts to my router in the Event Viewer.