ESXi 5.0 boot partition size

[tarasmandryk]

What is the recommended storage size for installing ESXi 5.0?

[RParker]

tarasmandryk wrote:

What is the recommended storage size for installing ESXi 5.0?

It's very small like 300 Meg.. or less.  The VM datastorage is limited to 64TB, but the recommendation varies on who you talk to.

The datastore should be big enough to accomodate your VM's so they are manageable, there aren't any real static figures.  you can minimize risk by going with smaller storage sizes, but then you will waste space because you have more datastores.. so it's a balance.

[tarasmandryk]

Thank you!

I just want to know best practices for sizing boot partition.

[svisen]

Hi tara,

exsi 5 is very samll in size on the boot device, u can use an usb drive to install and then run multiple server on it teh space require to install is less than the 300 mb .

[Dave_Mishchenko]

With ESXi you don't configure partition sizes as you may have done with ESX.   If you're installing to a flash device, the install uses about 1 GB of space. With a hard disk install about 5 GB is used (1 GB for system files and 4 GB for a scratch partition).

[tarasmandryk]

Thank you for helpfull answer.

I'm going to ask storage administrator to allocate 5GB for boot partition.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

I'd recommend you make this at least 6GB (I usually use 10GB). Depending on how the storage systems interprets GBs (1 GB = 1.000 * 1.000 kb or 1.024 * 1.024 kb) 5GB may not be sufficient.

André

EDIT: fixed the calculation for 1 GB

[tarasmandryk]

For ESXi 4.x I always allocate 6GB according to BP.

So I'll stick to this recommendation.