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armyants
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esxi 4.1 quirk - beginner mistake

When I installed esxi 4.1 on a raid system with 2 logical disks (eg. partition SYS for esxi and a larger partition DATA for other things) a few weird things happened.

1.  Sometimes my datastore1 and datastore2 would get installed opposite of what I wanted (eg. i try to instal esxi 4.1 from cd to partition SYS and after the install it's called datastore2, and the DATA partition has datastore1).

2.  If the datastores install in the right order (eg. datastore1 is on partition SYS and datastore2 is on partition DATA), I would see an extra 4GB scratch partition (FAT16) taking space away from datastore2.

The vmware tech support said it's because most folks install to a system with just one logical partition initially (the other partitions are formatted and datastores are created later).  He said the multiple logical partitions confused esxi's installer.

To fix the 1st situation I did what the vmwar tech support said.  Erased all partitions, created on SYS partition for the install, installed esxi, then created the other partition and then added the 2nd datastore.

To fix the 2nd situation I just deleted the datastore2 and when recreating datastore2 I selected the checkbox to use up all space on the partition.

Not sure if this makes sense, but hope it helps other beginners out there trying weird stuff.

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idle-jam
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anything that is 1GB to 2GB should be good.

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AndreTheGiant
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Welcome to the community.

To avoid this kind of problem the installation on USB/SD flash could be a solution Smiley Happy

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
idle-jam
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armyants
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Thanks for the suggestion.  I guess I could get some and stick in the backs of the R710 servers I have.  

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armyants
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Aw man the R710 may have an internal USB option Smiley Happy.  Should I use that with the esxi 4.1 usb key?  What's a safe min sized USB key to use?

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idle-jam
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anything that is 1GB to 2GB should be good.

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