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I have a HP DL360 G5 server running with ESXI 5 and a few internal SAS 36gb 2.5 drives, I was wondering if it was possible to connect a 2TB USB HDD and have my VM access the files on it.

I have looked around on the net but not found a definitive Yes/No answer, I have seen bits about host pass through or not but I'm not sure this was what I was doing. I found someone who had a few large internal drives which he set up as a second raid using something like FreeNAS but I cannot afford to buy more 2TB SATA drives when I have all my content on the USB drive already

I will be running one of the VM's as a media center server running iTunes with all the content in it.

Any advice would be helpful, if there is any further info I could provide let me know, I am fairly new to the ESXI thing as well so be gentle

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Pretty easy to do so.

  • Connect the USB drive to your ESXi Server (you should try wether USB 3.0 works, if not fallback to USB 2)
  • Open your VM Configuration, click on add device and add an USB controller (type doesn't matter as far as I know, all my VMs have EHCI+UHCI though)
  • Save and open the Configuration Dialog again, in add device you should now see usb device, click on it and select your USB Drive

I can confirm that this works for external harddrives (~7 tested), scanners, usb sticks, mouse's and keyboards.

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  • WOW that seems to easy lol, but I will give it a try. Have you had any issues with data transfer rates etc as I would be streaming HD films mainly and can be quite large.
    – Adam Mann Pro
    Dec 8, 2014 at 15:30
  • The speed was always arround 20 MB/s and up, even though I was using USB 2 (with USB 3 HDD's though). I'm using this for Backups or uploading large ISOs sometimes, so HD streams should work too.
    – Sebb
    Dec 8, 2014 at 15:37

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