From one PC to another, USB xpenology to ESXI VM USB?

[radly]

This may be a weird or stupid one so bear with me please and help out if you can.  

 

  When i built my current xpenology it was because i got my hands on a Supermicro server that has 2 SAS cards (connecting to the 16 SAS drives), 16 bays, 6 core dual cpu's (Xeon) and 64 gigs of ram (lets call this Machine A). It was a free-bee so i said hey why not.  I made my USB key, put 14 drives in and 2 SSD's and fired it up. Its been great. Since then i have gotten into ESXI Vmware and have really began to like running all of my things in VM's in that.  I have a ryzen TR 16 core 32 thread with 64 gigs of ram in that (lets call this Machine B).  I have my minecraft server, ARK server and PLEX server currently running in VM's on that.  All of the movies are grabbed for the plex server over the network from the Xpenology machine (all of the movies are stored on the 16 drives on Xpenology machine A and plex server is ran on  ESXI VM machine B with and trans-coded with a nvidia quadro card that is in pass-through to it)

 

  I would really love to get rid of having 2 servers and just use the one (Machine B). The supermicro (machine A) server has a back plane connecting the 16 drives that is independent of the motherboard and is more or less just part of the case itself. It seems that i can pull out the motherboard and move the SAS cards over to the ESXI machine (machine B) and just connect the 16 drives to machine B effectively turning Machine A into a JOBOD of sorts. I also have the powering of the drives without a motherboard figured out so thats not an issue. That along with the fact that 16 drives will not fit in Machine B's case. 

 

  So..here is the ask...  Could i feasibly pull the SAS cards out of machine A, put them in machine B, pass-through a USB port on a VM and plug my USB that im using on machine A into that and fire it up with no problems? What would be the problem here and or the solution?  Im sorry if this was a bit convoluted but Im trying to figure out a "pull the Xpenology USB out of machine A put in machine B and fire it up" solution here with a VM.

[flyride]

I've migrated a working system from baremetal to VM and back without issues.  But you better test (the loader/network in ESXi), test (the migration strategy), test (the passthrough strategy, which needs to include the SAS controllers).

 

You won't get anything useful from moving the USB key and passthrough, just install the ESXi loader image and it should boot right up.  You can prove that to yourself now by making a brand new clean USB loader, it should not try to migrate.