How do I monitor free space on the SD cards my ESXi hosts boot from?

[fairport]

Apologies in advance if I'm posting in the wrong place - this is my first ever post here and I'm also a relative noob with VMware :smileyblush:

Our two ESXi hosts are diskless and boot from internal SD cards - a deployment model I think is usually described as ESXi embedded?

Anyhow - it occurred to me the other day while applying some updates that we should really be aware of how much free space is available on those cards - just in case the next set of updates might not fit :smileyshocked:

Can anyone please tell us how we can go about ascertaining the used / free space on those SD cards?

Thanks in advance

[jrmunday]

Hi fairport,

Welcome to the communities. I'm not sure this is something you really need to be concerned about as the installation creates default partitions that pretty much look after themselves - see http://rickardnobel.se/esxi-5-0-partitions/ for partition details.

Using an SSH session to a host, you can use "df -h" to see the free space;

~ # df -h

Filesystem   Size   Used Available Use% Mounted on

VMFS-5      32.5G 972.0M     31.6G   3% /vmfs/volumes/ESXi-55-001-DAS

vfat         4.0G   3.6M      4.0G   0% /vmfs/volumes/52a47e02-d5ef6d95-0a66-000c29e7fa80

vfat       249.7M 157.0M     92.7M  63% /vmfs/volumes/4411c172-be9d0982-ddd0-4021aa5abf96

vfat       249.7M   8.0K    249.7M   0% /vmfs/volumes/2d59177b-0a2eefd7-0025-3721039f22ab

vfat       285.8M 191.3M     94.6M  67% /vmfs/volumes/52a47dfc-8a4944bc-5167-000c29e7fa80

I have a load of ESXi embedded installations and the only issue that I have with them is the tmp folder fills up after generating VMware support bundles.

Again, using an SSH session you can use "esxcli ..." to see this information;

~ # esxcli system visorfs ramdisk list

Ramdisk Name  System   Reserved     Maximum      Used  Peak Used  Free  Reserved Free  Maximum Inodes  Allocated Inodes  Used Inodes  Mount Point

------------  ------  ---------  ----------  --------  ---------  ----  -------------  --------------  ----------------  -----------  ---------------------------

root            true  32768 KiB   32768 KiB   468 KiB    472 KiB  98 %           98 %            8192              4096         3525  /

etc             true  28672 KiB   28672 KiB   148 KiB    176 KiB  99 %           99 %            4096              1024          459  /etc

tmp            false   2048 KiB  196608 KiB     8 KiB    188 KiB  99 %           99 %            8192               256            4  /tmp

hostdstats     false      0 KiB   84992 KiB  1240 KiB   1240 KiB  98 %            0 %            8192                32            4  /var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats

I have a PowerShell script that monitors the above and sends me an email alert if they are running short of space just in case I forget to delete the support bundle.

Cheers,

Jon

[fairport]

Thanks for responding so quickly

Managed to work out yesterday how to enable the shell and ssh and did use df -h to get some information - but it seemed to my untrained eye that the data all pertained to the datastores on our SAN rather than the folder/file structure on the SD cards??

Thanks for the information on the partitions If I've understood it correctly 4MB+250MB+250MB+110MB+286MB=900MB of partitions will have been created on our SD cards - and ESXi should not grow above this - even with repeated updates?

If that's the case I'd be reasonably comfortable as the cards themselves are 4GB in size.

Apologies for my slowness - I've been in the job for 20+ years and having acquired a virtualised server platform and SAN - I feel like a kid on the first day of school :smileyblush: