Moving from windows to vmware, mapping hard drive

[chrisnasah]

Hi,

 

Hope everyone doing well.

 

So currently I have a windows server with the OS installed on separate hard disk.  I have added 4 additional drives which are mapped on the windows server and running drive pool.

 

I am planning to install VMware on this physical box on the separate hard drive.  I will be looking to create a windows server VM and hoping to map the 4 drives and continue running drive pool. 

 

Can someone suggest how best to approach this as I have over 4TB of data which I don't want to risk corrupting.

 

Thanks

[otispresley]

Hi chrisnasah,

 

The easiest way to do this is to just do pass through (RDM) of your 4 physical disks to the Windows server VM.  There are posts in these forums about how to do this.  This will leave all the data intact, and since the pool information is on the disks, then DrivePool will automatically detect them and pool them.  You can either pass the disks through or pass the whole controller through, as long as it is a separate controller than the one you are using for VMware disks.  Hope this helps!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

This is what you're looking for, I think:

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/131-how-to-get-smart-data-passed-on-from-esxi-51-host/

 

Not only will is pass through the disks, so you can use them "as normal", it passes through the SMART data, so you can continue to get SMART data about the disks.