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I have a disk that I need to connect as a pass thru for one of my guest OSes, sbs 2011. The guests internal backup program will backup to the disk, which I'm planning to attach to the VMS SCSI controller. Since its a backup disk I also want to swap it.

I think what ill need to do, using powershell, is script the command to remove the pass thru from the VM, then use diskpart to take the disk offline m which will then allow me to remove the drive and add the other drive, and then reverse the steps I've outlined so the VM can backup again.

Does this sound correct? If not, how should I go about this?

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The drive will need to be offline on the host to mount it as a pass-through. So, if it is mounted as a SCSI device on the VM, you should be able to remove it from the VM, it should disappear from the VM You'd need to make sure it removes the disk gracefully though. Do your swap and then replace the disk and reverse. Sounds good in theory, but on the VM, you might have to import the foreign disk or put the disk back online. Might have to work on the script to make it a bit smarter than simply forcing it. But in theory it sounds like your idea will work.

If you are using it for backup, I'd want to see that it didn't hose up the disk. One of those times you might want to test it to be sure.

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  • Yes, will certainly be testing! I'm hoping the sobs backup expects the disk to be removed (at least 2008 seems to work that way). It never assigns a drive letter to the backup drive (removing it if there is one) so I think it should be ok.
    – Andy
    Mar 24, 2014 at 23:34
  • Yeah, there is some voodoo there and I would test the heck out of it. Might be better to just backup to a share on the drive instead of directly. If you are using the Virtual NIC, then there should be only a small amount of overhead. I dunno, I don't think I would do it this way, but I've seen much crazier things in my day.
    – MikeAWood
    Mar 24, 2014 at 23:37
  • I don't think sbs allows backing up to a network share, but maybe 2011 is different.
    – Andy
    Mar 25, 2014 at 0:34
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    Since it is based on 2008, it will, but might require using wbadmin from the command line to do it. Once scheduled, it should work fine, but I am not 100% sure you can configure an SMB path as a destination. You are looking for the -backupTarget command line switch. I use it to backup our boxes to our Netgear ReadyNas 2100. Works great.
    – MikeAWood
    Mar 25, 2014 at 0:40
  • Rather I meant to say I am not 100% sure you can configure the SMB path from the backup GUI. It seems to be an odd limitation that the software can handle, but the GUI didn't or doesn't support.
    – MikeAWood
    Mar 25, 2014 at 0:48

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