Poking about in ESXi4.1

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Just looking about, waiting for inspiration, slightly guided by the impossible aim of making a USB stick into a datastore. Here’s one snippet from the log file:

Sep  9 17:24:40 vmkernel: 0:00:00:09.737 cpu0:4497)FSS: 3924: No FS driver claimed device
 'mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:1': Not supported

And here’s another useful command I ran across which lists useful information about all your storage:

/var/log # esxcli corestorage device list
t10.ATA_____ST3500418AS_________________________________________5VM89S46
Display Name: Local ATA Disk (t10.ATA_____ST3500418AS_________________________________________5VM89S46)
Size: 476940
Device Type: Direct-Access
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____ST3500418AS_________________________________________5VM89S46
Vendor: ATA
Model: ST3500418AS
Revision: CC38
SCSI Level: 5
Is Pseudo: false
Status: on
Is RDM Capable: false
Is Local: true
Is Removable: false
Attached Filters:
VAAI Status: unknown
Other UIDs: vml.010000000020202020202020202020202035564d3839533436535433353030

mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0
Display Name: Local USB Direct-Access (mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0)
Size: 1896
Device Type: Direct-Access
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0
Vendor: Generic
Model: USB Flash Disk
Revision: 8.07
SCSI Level: 2
Is Pseudo: false
Status: on
Is RDM Capable: false
Is Local: true
Is Removable: true
Attached Filters:
VAAI Status: unknown
Other UIDs: vml.0000000000766d68626133333a303a30

mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0
Display Name: Local USB Direct-Access (mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0)
Size: 15318
Device Type: Direct-Access
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0
Vendor: Single
Model: Flash Reader
Revision: 1.00
SCSI Level: 2
Is Pseudo: false
Status: on
Is RDM Capable: false
Is Local: true
Is Removable: true
Attached Filters:
VAAI Status: unknown
Other UIDs: vml.0000000000766d68626133323a303a30

t10.ATA_____Hitachi_HDS721010CLA332_______________________JP2911HQ0MK9TA
Display Name: Local ATA Disk (t10.ATA_____Hitachi_HDS721010CLA332_______________________JP2911HQ0MK9TA)
Size: 953869
Device Type: Direct-Access
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____Hitachi_HDS721010CLA332_______________________JP2911HQ0MK9TA
Vendor: ATA
Model: Hitachi HDS72101
Revision: JP4O
SCSI Level: 5
Is Pseudo: false
Status: on
Is RDM Capable: false
Is Local: true
Is Removable: false
Attached Filters:
VAAI Status: unknown
Other UIDs: vml.01000000002020202020204a50323931314851304d4b395441486974616368

Actually, that looks like 

esxcfg-scsidevs -l

in another format.

I did try again to create a filesystem on my USB device with the usual result:

/sbin # vmkfstools -C vmfs3 /dev/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0
Checking if remote hosts are using this device as a valid file system. This may take a few seconds...
Creating vmfs3 file system on "mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0" with blockSize 1048576 and volume label "none".
/dev/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0: Permission denied.  (Have you set the partition type to 0xfb?)
Error: Permission denied
/sbin #

There doesn’t seem to be a way to make other filesystem types from the command line, but then, why would there be?

Moving swiftly on, there are plenty of other commands to play with, e.g.

 /sbin # esxcfg-info

prints hundreds of lines of config.

By my count there are 157 commands to explore in /bin and /sbin. I got that number by the following command: 

/bin # find /bin /sbin -type f -perm +100 -exec ls -l {} \; | wc -l

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