How big should esxi boot drive be?

[TedH256]

I am going to be installing to an HP server with an SD drive - it looks like the SD drive is maybe 4GB or so. Is there an optimal size for an ESXi boot drive?

I have heard that the boot drive should be large enough for some kind of temp file - vm temp, or esxi temp, or vmotion temp, or something like that.

What is best practice for this?

[idle-jam]

it will be enough. have a look here: http://www.vcritical.com/2009/08/if-vmware-esxi-4-is-so-small-why-is-it-so-big/ also for the scratch partition it will be 4GB and it can be pointed to be stored elsewhere instead of the USB drive ..

[AndreTheGiant]

4 GB could be enough.

I use 2 GB without issue.

Andre

[Dave_Mishchenko]

A flash device just needs to be 1 GB in size.  The remainder is not used.  If you're installing to a hard drive then the installer will create a 4 GB scratch partition if there is space, but that is not the case for flash devices.  You have to create the scratch partition on a datastore.

Dave
VMware Communities User Moderator

Free ESXi Essentials training / eBook offer

Now available - VMware ESXi: Planning, Implementation, and Security

Also available - vSphere Quick Start Guide

[TedH256]

Thank you very much, Dave

What is the procedure for creating the scratch partition? I have never seen where creating an OS partition was an option for ESXi - neither in the Vsphere client nor in the ESXi console. Is this something that has to be done from the cmd line on the console?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

You can setup the scratch location in different ways. See http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1033696 for details.

André

[TedH256]

thank you very much, everyone!