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I'm using ESXi 5.0 for a nonprofit I'm volunteering for, and I'd like to use ghettoVCB to regularly back up the VMs to USB storage. So far I've been able to see the USB devices in /dev and by using lsusb, but I can't figure out how to get a working mount binary.

To make it clear, I want the USB storage available to the ESXi host, not to a guest OS.

Many of the resources I've googled up apply to earlier versions of ESXi which apparently had the mount command.

This document implies it should magically work if I stop the usbarbitrator service before plugging in the drives, but that didn't help.

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Is there a way to enable mount?

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    Did you see the comment on that document that mentioned it would only support FAT16 filesystems less then 2GB?
    – Zoredache
    May 3, 2012 at 23:46
  • @Zoredache I thought that was listed as a "Symptom", which the "Resolution" is supposed to solve. But perhaps I have not formatted my drives correctly...
    – Nathan
    May 4, 2012 at 0:32

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ESXi is does not support mounting USB disks, it has very limited filesystem support.

The ghettoVCB docs seem to strongly indicate that it is intended to operate over NFS. So setup a box somewhere with a NFS server, and share out the USB disk. Connect to the NFS server from the VM and run your backups.

ESXi does support USB passthrough so your NFS server could be another VM. Keep in mind that the list of supported devices is pretty small. Other devices may work though.

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