I'm consolidating some resources for my home lab. I would like to take some existing data stored on a 2 TB SATA drive currently mounted on an existing physical install of Ubuntu 12.04 as ext3 and make it available to any number of machines that are being managed/run under ESXi 5.1.0. My host machine has open SATA ports, and I can also use an esata enclosure.
Currently, I'm booting ESXi from a USB stick and I have an eSATA drive set up as the only data store. My VMs are stored on this single data store.
I would like to make this additional 2 TB SATA drive available to whatever guests I run from this ESXi instance.
It would be best to not reformat the ext3 drive and use as is if possible.
I'm new to this, so would appreciate steps necessary to make this happen.