ESX 4 as guest for VCP4 exam sandbox

[djjazzy]

Hi everyone, I am a VM newbie but a network, OS, etc veteran and longtime consultant. I'd appreciate any help the community can offer! Here goes:

I have attended the vSphere 4 Install, Configure and Manage course and am studying the content in preparation to take the VCP4 exam. I have built a machine using Win 7 and installed Workstation 7. Using the guide I found on xtravirt.com, "XD10089_How_to_Install_ESX_4.0_on_Workstation_6.5.2_v1.1" I have created 2 virtual ESX4 servers and a Win 2K3 server on which I have installed vCenter Server. I am now attempting to go through the student manuals and do the lab exercises that were part of the course. I am having several issues doing this and wondered if any of the smart folks in this community can point me to docs that would be helpful or provide some pointers?

One problem, I have created both ESX servers with16GB virtual hds in w/s. This was a mistake as I have plenty of storage on my w/s host and now I don't have enough room for the VMs that I want to create on these ESX VMs. It is easy enough to change the ESX VM settings for the hard drive in w/s and I have increased the size to 100GB. I find though that when I manage ESX from vCenter the Storage1 Datastore show the old capacity. Looking at "Hardware", "Storage" and viewing "Devices" show my Local VMware Disk with 100GB capacity.

Help!

[rmalenchek]

After you add the drive space you have to use diskpart to extend the volume, Did you try that yet?

[rmalenchek]

My bad, I misread your post. to extend VMFS:

vmkfstools -X new_sizevmfs_name:disk_name

[continuum]

Here I use ESX in same scenario with even smaller disks - I use 8 Gb per ESX.

Then I have Starwind and an NFS-server installed on the host and use a image-device or some spare local disk as iSCSI-target.

Thats pretty convenient and is nice for learning this stuff as well.

You can also add second and third ... disk to the ESX-VMs and dedicate them to a single VMFS-partition.

I use to shredder my ESX-VMs in no time and then I can keep the VMs I installed to the second disks 😉




___________________________________

VMX-parameters- Workstation FAQ -[ MOA-liveCD|http://sanbarrow.com/moa241.html] - VM-Sickbay

[djjazzy]

Thanks for the reply, I'm not sure I understand where to go here tho. My ESX server is virtual and has been created as a VM running on Workstation. I've not created any VMs on it as yet because it doesn't have enough space. On non-virtual Linux hosts I would boot a gparted CD and grow an existing filesystem (such as /home) while it is unmounted. Are you saying I should open a console within vCenter server to this ESX VM, login as root and run vmkfstools while ESX is running? I have probably made a bad job of explaining my situation.

[djjazzy]

Hey Continuum, I'm grabbing Starwind right now and going to give it a go! Thanks for the tip.

[djjazzy]

Yo Continuum, I have Starwind free installed and setup and it works a treat! Thanks for your 2 cents worth!