


Virtual disks are what a virtual machine will stores files on. A datastore can max the storage of a physical disk, or not. A Datastore is basically this separate layer that sits between a physical device/disk and a virtual disk.If you're new to EXSI, you should know a few things: We attach the SATA HDDs as a RDM (Raw Device Mapper) into an existing virtual disk in the command line, then on the web app, we attach a new SCSI controller to the VM, and attach the newly created RDM as an "existing HDD" to the newly created SCSI controller.

I have not personally tried it yet, but the comments below have confirmed it works. There is now an option while editing your VM's settings to add a New raw disk when you click Add hard disk. This tutorial is partially based on VMWare's own KB and the now deprecated Forza IT blog post. This tutorial shows you how to pass SATA HDDs to the virtual machine on VMWare ESXI 6.5. You used to be able to setup RDMs in the desktop client, but with the introduction of the web console, this is no longer the case. In v6.5, the web app was introduced and the desktop client was deprecated. There aren't many tutorials about this, the only tutorials I've found were about passing through entire PCIe cards to VMs, or refered to old ESXI versions (below 6.5) that used a more comprehensive desktop client instead of the web app. How to passthrough SATA drives directly on VMWare EXSI 6.5 as RDMs
