So I am probably going to be rebuilding my home sever soon and want to go back to using a hypervisor and VMs instead of just Windows Pro. A year ago, when we moved into this house, I built a home server with the intention of using ProxMox, ZFS pool, and some different VMs. After a lot of google-ing, I couldn’t find a solution for making my DVD and Blueray drives available to the VMs.
Current hardware is x570d4u-2l2t, R5 3600, 16gb, 4 or 5 iron 4tb drives, and a couple of m.2. Running Windows Pro and virtual RAID with a movie, personal, and spouses partitions. I also share the DVD and BR drives on the network so my desktop and wife’s macbook can use them as well as being able to rip the kids movies.
I want a hypervisor that will allow me to utilize the optical drives, vm’s for my network controller, home assistant, plex server, blue iris/DVR etc. I am totally out of my depth outside of Windows.
Buy an HBA, plug the drives into the HBA and then plug the Optical drives into the on board SATA controller and pass the SATA controlled through to a VM (Assuming its supported)
I have enough onboard SATA in my current configuration that both drives are connected. Do I need to use an HBA for any specific reason?
I just couldn’t get Proxmox to do it last year. A bunch of googling said it wasn’t possible and I needed to get my system up and running with the kids movies and some other stuff. It looks like you are using ESXi with no issues.
This is super helpful though because I don’t know exactly how I am going to do my rebuild and where I am going to put my drives so they might all be external. I think I have a second M-Disc drive languishing in the closet.
Another option would be to get a USB DVD/Bluray drive(or pickup a USB-SATA adapter and use an existing drive, YMMV).
You can easily forward USB devices to a VM, even hot-plugging them between different VMs or the host system.
If all your guest systems use Linux you could also use NBD(Network Block Devices).