ESXi Passthrough hard drive to use ZFS on VM

Question

I have ESXI 6.7 installed on my r710. I have 1 2TB drive that's being used as the boot drive for ESXi and the VMs. I have 3 4TB drives that will be large storage. I want to send the 4TB disks directly to the VM so the raid can be handled with ZFS. How do I pass the drives directly to the VM?

Solution

There are several options. If the Boot drive is located in the same PCI RAID Controller you can't pass-through the entire controller.

Try using RDM option which will paravirtualize hard disks to the VM. To make this, present all the drives as RAID-0 to the ESXi. Also, you can make an RDM pointer to each hard disk.

You can use these links:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2046370

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1017530

Comments

[Rob Pearson]

I'm not sure I'm really understanding you - but would something like running FreeNAS or NAS4Free and mapping hard drives to ESXi via iSCSI work?

[Dave M]

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