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FrostyatCBM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Upgrade 5.0 U1 to 5.1 and /boot partition size

Wondering if anyone can shed any light on the requirements for ESXi v5.1 upgrade.

I understand /boot needs to be a minimum of 1GB in size,

but I cannot find any easy way of determining how large /boot is on my existing 5.0 servers.

I ran a console session and checked out 'df -u' (?) and similar but couldn't make much headway.

I can see all my SAN LUNs okay and some local disk objects, but nothing showing /boot as a name.

My hosts were originally configured identically back at version ESXi 4.0,

then were upgraded to v4.1 and then last year up to v5.0 U1.

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SG1234
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

does

du -sh /boot

work?

hope this helps

~Sai Garimella

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Where did you see this requirement? Please take a look at e.g. http://rickardnobel.se/esxi-5-0-partitions/ to see what's really required. Afaik there's no difference between ESXi 5.0 and 5.1.

André

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FrostyatCBM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The requirement for a 1GB boot device is here:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=203275...

"Installing ESXi 5.1 requires a boot device that is a minimum of 1GB in size."

I wasn't aware that this was also a requirement for 5.0 which is why I was trying to validate my current build (which had progressed from 4.0 to 4.1 to 5.0 and hopefully now 5.1).

So its probably OK ...

I tried logging in via PuTTY and ran "du -sh /boot" and various combinations including /bootbank and so on, but didn't seem to give me what I wanted.

Maybe booting the server using a 'gparted' live CD or similar tool might be the only way to get this info?

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Unless you initially installed the host with ESXi 3.5, the partitions are ok for 5.1. To list the partitions run e.g. fdisk -lu.

André

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lakshya32
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Enthusiast

Hi

Welcome to the communities.

Hope below ling will help you .

http://www.virtualizetips.com/2012/04/05/vsphere-esxi-5-upgrade-or-install-how-to-steps/

"When you fail to plan, you plan to   fail."
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FrostyatCBM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I followed through and booted up one of the physical hosts with a 'gparted' .ISO and found the following (and I assume that /dev/sda1 extended partition is in fact the boot partition):

Device Name  Filesystem  Description   Size

-----------  ----------  -----------  -----

/dev/sda4    FAT16                      4MB

/dev/sda1    extended                 896MB

  /dev/sda5  FAT16       Hypervisor1  250MB

  /dev/sda6  FAT16       Hypervisor2  250MB

  /dev/sda7  unknown                  110MB

  /dev/sda8  FAT16       Hypervisor3  286MB

/dev/sda2    FAT16                      4GB

/dev/sda3    unknown                   63GB

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Actually it's the (/dev/sda4) partition which is the boot partition. The 1GB requirement is for all system partitions - the first 5 partitions - together (see the link about partitioning I posted earlier).


André

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