ESX partitionning

[Fpwr]

Hi Guys,

I'm working on the following partitionning design for ESX 3.5 Update 2 servers

- 1 local partition for / (take all the space on the disk 68 Gb)

- 1 local partition for swap (512 Mb)

- 1 shared (SAN) partition for VMKCORE for every ESX hosts (1600 Mb).

I read the official VMware recommandations http://pubs.vmware.com/vi35u2/install/install_esx_partitioning.10.2.html but I would like to know if my partition design is officially supported by VMware ....

Thanks for your feedback

Regards

[Fpwr]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your participation, in fact my concern is about having 16 different LUN or just 1 big LUN shared between all my hosts !!! And if it's shared is it supported by VMware and how every system deal with that big LUN to share 100 Mb for VMKCORE partition?

Regards

Julien

[dconvery]

OK...now I see the light!!! Now David's comment makes perfect sense. You need a dedicated vmkcore for each individual ESX server. Your best bet here is to just create a mirrored pair of local disk for the OS. This should be the smallest disk you can buy because you will only need about 18-20GB if you use Jase's table.The more expensive SAN disk should be made into VMFS.

While we are on that subject, the VMFS LUNs should be of sufficient size to support about 15-20 VMs on each with space for snapshots, vswp, etc. For TIER2 disk, like the EVA and Clarrion, I usually recommed about 500-750GB LUNs. For TIER1, like the DMX or XP, you MAY get a little larger. The key with the SAN LUNs is the number of running VMs more than the size. Too many VMs can cause locking issues.

Jase also makes a good case for the local VMFS, if you want some playground space.

Dave

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The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

Nathaniel Borenstein

[weinstein5]

Nope in the midwest freezing my rear end off - the original question asked about a 1600 MB LUN for vmkcore - theoretcally you can have 16 ESX Servers share a single vmkcore partition assuming there are no issues with locking - you are correct the vmkcore partition is used when there is a PSOD and data structure get writtent there on the next reboot they get copied out to ESX Server file system and can be analyzed by VMware Tech Support to troubleshoot - now I see a potential problem if there is a single vmkcore partition -What if you have multiple PSODs which on will get written/recovered

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[stratolynne]

Great that you have shared these partition sizes.

I have two questions. With ESX 3.5 how can check to see what these values are that have already been set up during an earlier installation? And can you modify or add in a partitions that were not created during the installation?

Thanks!

[dconvery]

To see what's going on, use "df -h" for the COS partitions and "vdf -h" for the VMDK partitions. If you have free disk space, you can use fdisk to create the partitions and mkfs to create the filesystems (similar to format)

Dave

************************

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

Nathaniel Borenstein