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ac-ceat
Contributor
Contributor

Upgrade from 2.5.4 to 3.0.2 - lack of service console disk space

Hi,

I'm planning an upgrade from ESX 2.5.4 to 3.0.2 and the preupgrade.pl script shows

Checking Service Console disk space...

ERROR: ESX Server 3.x requires at least 1000 MB

ERROR: of free disk space to upgrade.

Does that mean 1000 MB of free space just on the / partition, or does that also include /var /tmp and stuff like that?

My current partitioning looks as follows:

/dev/sda2 1.7G 989M 690M 59% /

/dev/sda1 99M 19M 75M 20% /boot

/dev/sda5 1.7G 36M 1.6G 3% /home

/dev/sda7 2.3G 33M 2.1G 2% /tmp

/dev/sda3 3.8G 179M 3.4G 5% /var

So disk space on / is really smaller than 1000 MB, but there is plenty of space in /tmp and /var is also quite big. I thought that partitioning this way was a good idea, in order to prevent flooding / in case of a full /var or /tmp.

Can I run an upgrade or should I use another approach? Best practices anyone?

Thanks a lot,

Lars

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opbz
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

this is a very radical update

ESX3 is VERY different beast from ESX 2.5

VFMS 3 is significntly better than 2 it groups all data of VMs together

the netwoking is a LOT better and service console is no longer hogging eth0

/home is no longer used as much as all VM files are kept in /vmfs volumes this might be a way to get more space in your system...

Personally if I was doing this update I would consider doing a fresh install.

I would export the VMDK files and reimport them to ESX3 then recreate the vmx files by selecting to use existing disks.

Also remember in ESX 3 Virtual Center is a pay for product its no longer free as it was for ESX2.5 so if you have more than one sever consider getting it.

depping
Leadership
Leadership

I would just reinstall and use a different approach for the partition table

/tmp = 1024mb

/var = 2048

/home = i hardly use this ever

/ = min 6gb

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

ac-ceat
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

thanks for your answers.

My intention was to power down all VMs on all ESX hosts in the Datacenter and migrate them to one ESX host and perform an upgrade on that host in order to do the relocation of the vmx-Files onto the datastores. I wanted to do a fresh install on the other ESX hosts an then move the machines back. After that I planned to freshly install the previously upgraded hosts.

This worked well in the other Datacenter where service console disk space was fine.

Regards,

Lars

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ac-ceat
Contributor
Contributor

Hi again,

everthing worked well. I was able to free up some space and the upgrade finished without problems.

Regards,

Lars

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