ESI supports Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and VMware vSphere hypervisors. The disk options in ESI vary depending on what the hypervisor supports.
The following table shows the storage options that are supported by ESI for each hypervisor.
|
Disk Option |
Microsoft Hyper-V |
VMware vSphere |
Citrix XenServer |
|
Pass-through disk |
Yes |
Yes |
|
|
File-based or virtual disk |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Datastore |
|
Yes |
|
|
SCSI disk |
|
Yes |
|
|
Host disk |
Yes |
|
|
|
Storage repository |
|
|
Yes |
|
Cluster shared volumes |
Yes |
|
|
You can create the following disk types for virtual machines:
SCSI disk (VMware vSphere)
Virtual disk (Hyper-V, XenServer, and VMware vSphere)
Pass-through SCSI disk (Hyper-V) or raw device mapping (RDM) (VMware vSphere)
Notes:
For hypervisors, ESI does not support creating new SCSI controllers. However, ESI uses existing SCSI controllers to create disks for a virtual machine.
For hypervisors, if the Virtual disk option is not available, confirm that the applicable hypervisor appears as a connected hypervisor in the Hypervisors section in the main ESI window. When you select the virtual machine in the Hosts section, the Hypervisor and Hypervisor Type must appear at the top of the center pane (gray information area). If these do not appear, the virtual machine might have been discovered before the hypervisor. If so, remove the virtual machine and add it again as a host.
For XenServer, install xs-tools on the virtual machine before you add or remove virtual disks on a virtual machine.
The order of the pages and steps vary slightly in the Create Disk wizard, depending on the disk type that you select.
