Mounting an SMB share in VMWare ESXi 3.5

Question

We have a VMWare ESXi 3.5 server that we are trying to get performance information on via esxtop logging, but I can't get an SMB share to mount so I can store the logs there. What am I missing?

The command I'm trying to use (per the vendor's instructions) is:

mount -t smbfs -o username=esxshare //WindowsShare/esxshare /mnt/esxshare

I have verified that I am logged in as root, and that the /mnt/esxshare directory has been created.

My biggest concern is that my web research so far indicates that ESXi can't actually mount SMB shares, only ESX can. I also would need to enable the firewall on VMWare to allow SMB, but ESXi doesn't seem to have an interface to that either. Am I correct?

I'm open to other suggestions on how to get a share mounted, but I'm a Linux newb. My only other theory would be to do an NFS share somewhere, mount that in the Service Console, and then get on with the esxtop logging I need to do. I've also got a message in to our vendor asking for help, but I'm hoping to understand what exactly is failing to get a better understanding of the VMWare guts.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

CC

UPDATE

So it doesn't appear like my prospective vendor has any options for this, either. We're still new to virtualization, so we'll consider using ESX Server when we upgrade from our current 3.5 installation in the next year or so.

In the meantime, the best we can do is measure peak IOPS of our current system, and get stats from other non-VM systems that connect to our SAN. Hopefully that will be enough.

Answer 1

There's a chance you could massively hack then compile samba for the non-*nix ESXi unsupported command line but you'd need fairly mad skills and it might not be stable, certainly won't be supported. You'd have more luck with the soon-to-disappear-anyway regular ESX as it has a Service Console, ESXi doesn't.

I'd try to think of a better way of doing what you need.