Hi,
I'm after some assistance/guidance on a move from a Hyper-V 2016 host to ESXi free edition. Primary reason being I have a USB device that I need to pass through to a VM and cannot effectively complete this as things currently stand.
The current host is standalone, running on a single Xeon with 32GB of RAM. It is a domain controller and Hyper-V role server, running only 3 or 4 VMs at a time.
Windows boots from a small SSD, but there is also an LSI 9260-8i with two RAIDs. Both are GPT NTFS formatted single partitions which Windows sees directly as disk drives. One contains live data which is shared and VMs access via SMB, The other contains my VM storage and some other bits and pieces.
First questions are;
Does ESXi free allow USB device passthrough like standard edition does?
Can a VM be given direct access to a physical disk/RAID, without it having to be converted to some other parition scheme or filesystem (i.e can a Windows VM access one of the RAIDs currently on GPT NTFS setup without having to clear the data first)?
Secondly, it would be great if someone can confirm my process below will be viable;
I would first like to create a new RAID on the controller ready for an ESXi datastore
Move the VMs to a PC I have with Windows 10 running the Hyper-V role just to get them off the old host
Install ESXi on the new host, and create just one datastore on the new RAID
Use the vCenter converter, to convert the 2016 VMs from my PC into the new host/datastore
Power up all VMs to validate migration was successfull
Provide direct access to existing RAID volumes to Windows 2016 VMs
If more info is needed before answers can be provided, please let me know.
Thanks in advance for any guidance you may be able to offer.
Eds