The four numbers after that give the number of cylinders (7625), heads (255), sectors per track (63), as well as the total number of sectors (122508544). The “gpt” indicates this is a GPT partition table. To find the partitions on this device use the partedUtil getptbl command. Now find the USB disk device from /dev/disks. Permanently disable this service too: chkconfig usbarbitrator offĤ. So skip them, but if skipping them doesn’t help then try again without skipping them.

Shutdown the USB arbitrator service (this is used to present a USB disk to a VM): /etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop ( Update: one of the readers emailed me to say this step and the next are not needed and in fact it stops the USB disk from being made visible. First, connect to the ESXi host via SSH.Ģ. ( fdisk while present is no longer supported as it doesn’t do GPT).ġ. This meant a bit of mucking about with partedUtil, which is the ESXi command line way of fiddling with partition tables. In my case the disk already had partitions on it so I had to make some changes to the instructions in that blog post. you use the USB disk entirely as a datastore. This blog post is about presenting a USB disk without ESXi installed on it – i.e. Installing ESXi 6.5 to a USB is straight-forward.Īnd this blog post is a good reference on what to do so that a USB disk is visible as a datastore. I couldn’t get any VMs to run off the USB disk but I spent some time getting the USB disk presented as a datastore so wanted to post that here. Recently I wanted to install ESXi 6.5 on a USB disk and also use that disk as a datastore to store VM on.

Install esxi 6.5 from usb