Amahi in ESXi with greyhole

	WARNING
	This is recommended only for advanced users, proceed with caution.

Back to 'Amahi Virtualized'

Amahi in VMware ESXi with Greyhole

This tutorial will skip installation of ESXi but note that if you are installing ESXi 5.5 on consumer hardware it is likely network or storage drivers will not be on the default installation disk. You can either add your own or create a custom .iso file with the network drivers bundled with the installer.

When performing the installation of ESXi you will need to have at least one local disk to do the installation and use as a datastore for your VMs. For Amahi with Greyhole we will use all other drives in "Raw Device Mapping" mode and attach them directly to the Amahi VM.

Some quick points to cover about using Greyhole drive pooling within this setup..

• It is not advisable to use Greyhole pooling with drive images (instead of physical drives) due to the added overhead and I/O delay that can be introduced. It will slow down your Proxmox machine and your Amahi file server
• This process does work with any Amahi version and installation method, however if Greyhole isn't fully functional with a release of Amahi, it's not advisable to use Greyhole in this case.
• When the physical drive is added to the VM, it will not show up as a datastore inside of the ESXi host. Rather all disk and partition management will be done directly in the Amahi VM.

This documentation is to be continued...

Helpful links

http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php
http://forza-it.co.uk/esxi-5-1-using-raw-device-mappings-rdm-on-an-hp-microserver