I was looking how to manage a dedicated storage via Vmware ESXi and the biggest questions I had was how to store the files and how to recover them if the virtual machine crashes, or the motherboard for the ESXi server.

I didn’t want to use the VMFS file system to store the files, as I didn’t see really a tool to recover files from a damaged file system.

The VMFS file system is related not meant for data storage, and I only use it to store the virtual machines that I use.

ESXi has a very nice feature despite no official support where a hard drive can be passthrough to a virtual machine.

Here are the commands to be entered

cd /dev/disks
ls -l

Look for new hard drive name.

Create a vdmk file which is a passthrough, in my case:

vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD60EFRX2D68L0BN1_________________________WD2DWXB1HB4J6U1F /vmfs/volumes/SSD850Pro/Openmediavault/BTRFS6TB.vmdk

Add the vdmk to your virtual machine, Openmediavault in my case, and here you go. This is absolutely awesome as I am able to have Btrfs on the hard drives in passthrough mode to Vmware ESXI.