VMware’s automatic partitioning schemes over the years don’t seem to follow best practices and lessons learned in the community and in some cases what their instructors teach in the classroom. I think it would help if VMware read the partitioning discussions on their forums or some of the books from the accomplished authors in the community. For instance, creating a mount point for /var/log instead of /var which can contain a subdirectory such as /var/xyz having large core dumps for 3rd party agents or products. I’m all for keeping things simple but not at the price of risking a virtual infrastructure component running 1, 10, or 100+ VMs. From what I’m seeing, manual partitioning is still needed in ESX 4.0 to be in alignment with best practices.

Another example would be creating dedicated partition for /opt. Many people have talked about their experience of 3rd party software dumping their logs in /opt. Without a dedicated /opt partition, these logs fill up /

Jason Boche, vExpert
boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist
VMware Communities User Moderator
Minneapolis Area VMware User Group Leader
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