vSphere 4 Host Partition question

[dchunt]

I am trying to set up an ESX host on mirrored 144 GB drives in a Blade server and am not sure exactly how to partition it. All the VM's as well as ISO files, etc will be on an external storage array so I don't need to have any data or utility files stored on the host drive. I have read a lot of the posts on recommended partitioning of the ESX host and plan to follow the minimum recommendations and then increase some of them as shown in the table:

Partition Name	FS Type	Rec Min (GB)	size (GB)
Swap	Swap	1.6	1.6
boot	EXT3	1.1	1.1
home	EXT3	1	2
opt	EXT3	2	2
tmp	EXT3	2	10
var	EXT3	4	4
var/log	EXT3	2	5
vmimages	EXT3		1

What confuses me is what I should do with the rest of the disk space. Should the remaining disk space be allocated to the root ("/") partition? VMware recommends about 5 GB which seems small for the size of the drive I have. Should I leave some free as unallocated? What is thebest practice?

thanks,

Dan

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I add only /home, /tmp, and /var to the mix. The rest I leave out. I also increase swap to 2G (1600 MB is usually sufficient).

As for ISO storage, I would place them on an NFS based datastore or one of your other datastores. There should be no need to use /vmimages for anything other than VMware's uses. This makes sharing ISO files easier.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009

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[dchunt]

Thanks for your info Ed. I agree about not putting any ISO's locally. I deliberately partition the vmimages off from root and make it small since that is a directory that ESX install creates by default. By partitioning it off from root I make sure that some stupid admin (maybe me <G>) doesn't accidentally try to store a bunch of stuff there and run root out of space.

But my question still is - should I put all remaining unallocated space to the root partition or should I set the root partition to, say, 10 GB and leave the remaining space on the drive unallocated. The latter seems like a waste to me. Is there any harm in assigning the rest of the space to root?

Dan

[lmonaco]

No harm, but we just leave it unallocated. A waste? Yes. But it's there if we need emergency space for something in the future.

[dchunt]

One thing that I found out just recently is that apparently VMware uses the /vmimages dir to put some files (such as the floppy image with the paravirtual SCSI driver) during the install of vSphere 4. Given that I am thinking I should bump up the size of that partition to 5 GB instead of the 1 GB so I don't have a problem with not enough space for the auxillary files that the install wants to put there.

FWIW,

Dan