Adding storage - simple question; seeking reassurance

[grabegrabe]

ESXi 3.5 on PowerEdge 2900. Local storage (3.15 TB total).

Currently: one datastore w/one extent on vmhba1:1:0:2. 1.14TB, block size 1MB. Houses three virtual machines, all doing important work (of course).

I want to add a new datastore so I can install a new virtual machine with a 1TB hard drive (since a 1MB block size will not accommodate a drive that large).

When I go to add the datastore, the capacity available says 1.72 total, but 1.71 free. This is on vmhba1:0:0.

Some space is claimed by two partitions.

Partition 1: XXX DatastoresAn... 266 MB

Partition 2: Win95 FAT32 LBA 2GB

Free Space: 1.71 TB

(see attached screenshot)

Question 1: The existence of the two partitions on what is otherwise unused space (AFAIK) makes me concerned that even the "free" space is not really free. What are the odds that adding the datastore on the free space will cause problems?

Question 2: What are the existing partitions? VMWARE docs recommending using the entire space -- what are the odds I'm going to blow up my system by doing so?

[DSTAVERT]

It looks like there was already a partition on the drive. Where did the drive come from? Check the docs that came with the drive

[PaulSvirin]

I think the same way as previous poster.

Can you run fdisk -l on this drive and then mount this "secret" partition to have a look at the contents?

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iSCSI SAN software

[grabegrabe]

dstavert & paulsvirin:

thanks much for your responses. If you can bear with me a little longer...

the drive itself appears as vmhda1:0:0:0 in /dev/disks. The partitions appear as vmhda1:0:0:1 and vmhda1:0:0:2.

fdisk -l vmhda1:0:0:0 just shows those two partitions as follows:

vmhda1:0:0:1 - ID is "de," an unknown system. Not a boot disk.

vmhda1:0:0:2 - ID is "c," WIN95FS. Boot flag.

I thought I could mount these simply with something like mount vmhda1:0:0:2 /mnt, but I get "use esxcfg-nas." As I look into that, though, it seems that it won't do precisely what I'm trying to accomplish--doesn't that just mount a share on an existing NAS to the ESXi server? How, then, can I mount these partitions?

By way of comparison, FWIW, when I do fdisk -l vmhda1:1:0:0 (the active disk), I get roughly what I'd expect:

vmhda1:1:0:1 - ID is "fc," VMKcore system. Not a boot disk.

vmhda1:1:0:2 - ID is "fb," VMFS. Not a boot disk.

[grabegrabe]

I should add: it looks from fdisk like the 1.71 TB reported as free by the infrastructure client is, indeed, truly free (as in, unallocated and available to be used in a new partition). If it comes down to it, I think I could just leave the other two partitions as they are -- though I'd still like to figure out what's on them.