RDM on Local SATA Disk in ESXi4

RDM with local SATA disk is now working in ESXi with following steps:

- locate your target RDM disk using 'fdisk -l' or 'ls /vmfs/devices/disks'
- create .vmdk RDM file using 'vmkfstools -r /vmfs/devices/disks/... .vmdk'
- add above .vmdk RDM file to VM as existing disk

My main reason for doing this is to bypass VMFS to utilize benefit of Windows Home Server: disk is readable by standard windows machine.

LSI Driver for Windows Home Server on ESX

If WHS installer cannot detect virtual disk and complains about no hard drive to install:

- get LSI20320-R SCSI Driver for Windows 2003 Server from http://www.lsi.com/
- copy driver files to floppy image; I use existing VM on ESX to create a new image and copy
- mount the floppy image to WHS and select the scsi driver

VMware, OpenSolaris ZFS, iSCSI

http://www.devtrends.com/index.php/opensolaris-iscsi-target/

Configure Windows 2008 as NFS share for VMware ESX 3.5, 4.0

This step-by-step guide contains necessary steps to setup Windows 2008 as a NFS server for VMware ESX server.
Source: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/188140

*** On Domain Controller, Install Identity Management AD Schema Extension for Unix

# run: servermanagercmd -install ADDS-Identity-Mgmt
That installs
Identity Management Active Directory Shema extensions for Unix
and Active Directory (eg ), if not already installed

# Create AD user 'root', uid = 0
# Create AD group 'root' (pre-win2000 group name e.g. 'root-') gid = 0
# Set unix properties of 'root' user to uid = 0 and gid = 0

*** On file server, install Service for NFS

# Set Identity AD Name to your AD domain

*** On file server, Configure Share

# Create SMB share
# Set NTFS Perm to Everyone Full Control

# Permission for NFS:
## Allow anonymous access: uncheck
## Root Access: allow

Install VMware Tools on Windows Server 2008 Core

From:
http://blog.baeke.info/blog/_archives/2007/6/28/3052583.html

Command line in question is:

msiexec.exe /i "(path to VMware Tools.msi)" /qn