How to extend paritions in ESXi

[dbutch1976]

Hi all,

I have a number of hosts that are using 6GB boot from SAN running ESXi 6.5. I am preparing to upgrade these to 7 or 8 depending on wether or not the hardware supports it.

My question is, can I extend the boot from SAN partitions to 32GB and then have the new partition size recognized by the OS? If so, what is the process?

Is it better to extend the disks and then perform a clean install of ESXi 7?

Ultimately, I want to ensure that the new partition size of 32GB is recognized by the OS and fully utilized.

Thanks.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

I didn't test this, but if the boot LUN does not have a VMFS partition (datastore), i.e. only the ESXi system partitions, the upgrade to ESXi 7.x or later should reformat the extended LUN, and make use of the 32GB.

In case the boot LUN contains a VMFS partition, and you don't need it, you may delete that datastore prior to running the upgrade.

André

[dbutch1976]

Thanks Andre, I believe you are correct. I will test this and confirm.