Passthrough SATA disk to VMWare ESXi 6.5 as RDMs

Passthrough SATA disk to VMWare ESXi 6.5 as RDMs

I have a Dell Precision 3420 with Intel Core i7-6700 4 Cores 8 Threads, 4 x 8GB RAM,  Micron 1100 SSD, 2TB HDD. Windows 10 was already installed on Micron SSD and I keep it intact.

Later on I installed ESXi 6.5 (VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.5.0-4564106.x86_64.iso) installed on a 16GB USD flash drive with the 2TB HDD as data store with a few more VMs created.

Now I created a VM with 1 vCPU 4GB RAM with the physical Micron SSD mounted as the only drive that boots to Windows 10.

The procedure is to create a new VM called Micron, enable ESXi SSH with 3 below commands.

1. Locate physical disk

ls -l /vmfs/devices/disks

lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            72 Mar 14 10:55 vml.010000000020202020202020203137323431374137464231414d6963726f6e -> t10.ATA_____Micron_1100_SATA_256GB__________________________172417A7FB1A
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            74 Mar 14 10:55 vml.010000000020202020202020203137323431374137464231414d6963726f6e:1 -> t10.ATA_____Micron_1100_SATA_256GB__________________________172417A7FB1A:1
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            74 Mar 14 10:55 vml.010000000020202020202020203137323431374137464231414d6963726f6e:2 -> t10.ATA_____Micron_1100_SATA_256GB__________________________172417A7FB1A:2
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            74 Mar 14 10:55 vml.010000000020202020202020203137323431374137464231414d6963726f6e:3 -> t10.ATA_____Micron_1100_SATA_256GB__________________________172417A7FB1A:3

2. Confirm VM directory

ls /vmfs/volumes/2TB/Micron/

3. Create .vmdk file from Micron SSD

The idea is similar to "mnt -t nfs 192.168.1.37:/mnt/hd0/1 /volume/mtv3700d"

vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____Micron_1100_SATA_256GB__________________________172417A7FB1A "/vmfs/volumes/2TB/Micron/Micron_RDM.vmdk"

Finally I can add the newly created .vmdk file to the Micron VM as the only harddisk. It boots to Windows 10 as if it is a physical machine.

End