Partitioning

[MystikWeb]

Hi there guys,

I have been handed our ESX installation and just need some clarification.....

We have an 2.5.3 installation of esx server, and an evalution version of VC2 running with it.

We created a new Raid Array with two on board disks, which equated to 137gb.

It looks like VC2/ESX server has already created it as a secondary vmfs store, which I did not want. Well not all of it.

I wanted to create a native linux partition on the array for storage of OS iso's for machine installations, and then the rest for vmfs.

Output of fdisk is:

\# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/cciss/c1d0: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 53126 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/cciss/c1d0p1 1 53126 426734563+ fb Unknown

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 255 heads, 32 sectors, 8716 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 8160 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 * 1 13 53024 83 Linux

/dev/cciss/c0d0p2 14 640 2558160 83 Linux

/dev/cciss/c0d0p3 641 1016 1534080 82 Linux swap

/dev/cciss/c0d0p4 1017 8716 31416000 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/cciss/c0d0p5 1017 8690 31309904 fb Unknown

/dev/cciss/c0d0p6 8691 8715 101984 fc Unknown

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d1: 255 heads, 32 sectors, 35139 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 8160 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/cciss/c0d1p1 1 35139 143367104 fb Unknown

Could someone please advise how best I could complete the native and vmfs partition on the 135gb as I have outlined above??

Any and all help will be really apreciated.

[GBromage]

Did you want the ISO store on the first or second RAID disk?

Provided there's no data on the vmfs partition on that drive (VERY IMPORTANT TO CHECK!!!), then you can just delete it (/dev/cciss/c0d0p5 or /dev/cciss/c0d01p0) and then create your ext3 partition for the iso files with whatever size you want, and then add new VMFS partition with the remainder.

Hope that helps,

Greg

Message was edited by:

GBromage

[MystikWeb]

Can I do that via the VMWare MUI?

or do I need to do it via console? (Which a little nervous about doing, as normally use yast or soe other partitionaer)

I want to do it on the array which is around 135gb in total, the other array of 400GB is where the current virtual machines are being stored.

[GBromage]

I think you'll need to create the ext3 (Linux) partition on the service console. The VMFS partition can be created in the MUI.

fdisk can be a bit scary at first, but just take things slowly and double-check each step of the way.

Your 135Gb drive is /dev/cciss/c0d1 so you'd type:

fdisk /dev/cciss/c0d1

to work on that drive. Using the command 'm' will bring up the help.

Message was edited by:

GBromage

[MystikWeb]

Hey thanks.. I appreciate your help....

yeah I figured that may be the disk after I posted......

/dev/cciss/c0d1p1 must be the vmfs partition which was automatically created.

143367104/1024/1024 gave me 136.72552490234375 which works out to the available space for the 135gb drive.

So I need to log into the MUI, remove the vmfs volume from that drive then do the fdisk commands?

[GBromage]

Yes.

Theoretically, you can just delete the VMFS partition from fdisk, but it's probably neater/more correct to remove it through the MUI first.

[MystikWeb]

Cool,

Well going to backup all the virtual machine disks to a remote nfs share tonight, schedule an outage in to allow me to work on this...

keeping fingers crossed of course hehehe

Thanks for the help, really apprecaited.

[GBromage]

If you've got NFS share's set up, you're probably better off just putting your ISO files on the NFS server, then mounting that share onto the ESX host.

That's one of the preferred ways of doing it under VI3 anyway.

[MystikWeb]

that could be an easier option I suppose..... set the server up to mount the nfs volume on boot.

Long term is that we will be creating the vmfs on SAN volumes when we upgrade to ESX3, and purchase VC2 to manage our environment, then we can use vmotion and all the other goodies to move machines around easier to schedule outages etc.