Datastore for ISO sharing

Needed a place to put ISO images for loading VM guest OS's. I know my old Win2k machine could support NFS and I need to move off of Win2k anyway. The Win2k machine is pretty old so it would make a good utility machine.

I used Microsoft's Services for Unix (SFU) some years back while consulting at IBM working on Citrix. SFU does support NFS services. Also, I wanted a RAID location for storage and backup of various data.

The VMware best practice is to access IP Datastores on a separate high speed network between ESXi and the ISO share. Theoretically, no internet traffic is needed over this link.

Get ready
Install a Intel Dual Gig-e card in ESXi
Upgrade Win2k to WinXP
Install a Intel Pro 1000 into XP
Connect the two gig-e cards to a gig-e switch

Make space
Install SATA RAID card and two 1 TB SATA drives in XP
Set the drives to RAID 1 (mirror)
Dump all the Windows, Linux, VMware, etc. ISO's in a folder

Here comes NFS
Download and install MS Services for Unix (SFU) 3.0 on XP
NFS share out a folder on the raid array

Issues with permissions in SFU
I ran into some trouble getting ESXi to properly connect to the NFS mount point. After some searching, it turns out I needed to pull the "/etc/passwd" and "etc/group" files from ESXi and place them on XP in order for the user/group mapping to work properly.

To get them from ESXi back to XP, I had to log into the console of ESXi and copy the files to the exposed ESXi Datastore directory, then go into the vSphere client, browse to the folder on the Datastore where I placed the files and then download them to XP machine.

Once these were in place, I could add the NFS mount point as a Datastore in ESXi, over the gig-e network.


**
Now, I have a 1 TB Datastore where all my ISO's sit, as well as any other files needed by Windows, Linux, or ESXi.

Later, I will talk about using this same storage system to test and use an iSCSI Datastore.