I've installed ESXi 3.5 u4 on a server with a 900GB RAID array. The problem is that the ESXi install automaticaly consumes the entire disk with a VMFS datastore that has a block size of 1MB. This prevents me from creating virtual disks large than 256GB on the datastore. I need to create one large 600GB virtual disk but can't. How do I get around this limitation?
Is there a way to change the block size to 4MB durring the install? Or is there a way to limit the install to using only a 20GB volume leaving the remaining space for a new 600MB VMFS volume that I can create through the console without issue? Is there a boot disk utility that I can use to create the small partition that the ESXi installer will recognize?
There is also no way to change the block size after you set it without deleting the datastore and re-creating it, which will wipe out any data on the datastore. but yes, you can select an appropriate block size when creating a data store
Also, it is possible to choose vmfs partition size during installation (choose recommended partition scheme but then edit as necessary)
