Is hard drive preparation needed?

[HankLambert]

I am getting ready to install my first esxi 4 server. I have a single 1 TB sata drive that I am going to start with. I wanted to have 3 physical partitions on the hard drive; one for esxi, one to hold ISOs, and a third to hold the VMs. My question is do I need to partition the drive before installing esxi? Does esxi use the whole drive, or only what it needs for it's install? For instance, if esxi needs 60 MB, is the rest of the drive available for me to partition out from within the vsphere client? And finally, if I do need to partition it beforehand, what is a safe partition size to give esxi 4?

I hope my questions are clear, thanks for any help.

[rogard]

Place ESX4i on a thumb drive then use the entire 1TB HDD for ISOs and VMs

[athlon_crazy · Accepted solution]

Just create 3x logical drive first using any Linux Live CD

1st drive should go for ESXi (If not mistaken, less than 2gb) and the rest up to you to decide. VMFS can be created later via vi-client.

vcbMC-1.0.6 Beta

vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite

http://www.no-x.org

[HankLambert]

That's exactly what I was wanting to know. I usually use g-parted for partitioning, so I'll try that tonight.

Thanks,

Hank