Hello,
So I was installing 5.5U2 onto a Dell with the internal SD cards. My SD cards are 16GB. (2 of them mirrored). I did the install onto that drive. After it was installed, I noticed I still did not have a /scratch partition.
Typically, installs onto SD/Flash do not create /scratch due to sizes (/scratch is 4Gb).
I thought that if I put in 16GB SD cards, the installer would create a 4GB /scratch.
It didn't.
Here's what it created:
14.9G Feb 11 16:26 mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0
4.0M Feb 11 16:26 mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:1
250.0M Feb 11 16:26 mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:5
250.0M Feb 11 16:26 mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:6
110.0M Feb 11 16:26 mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:7
286.0M Feb 11 16:26 mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:8
2.5G Feb 11 16:26 mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:9
/dev/disks # partedUtil get mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0
1947 255 63 31293440
1 64 8191 0 128
5 8224 520191 0 0
6 520224 1032191 0 0
7 1032224 1257471 0 0
8 1257504 1843199 0 0
9 1843200 7086079 0 0
So it used about 3.3GB out of a 16GB SD I called support, they found that if its SD.. this is what you get..no matter how big the SD card is. I would really like to have /scratch on this SD card instead of off loading it to a datastore or NFS share somewhere.. Can this be done?
Support has also suggested I could boot off a Live CD, use parted to create a partition out of the unused space, and then put a datastore on it, and then redirect /scratch to that datastore.. thoughts ?
Thanks, Paul
Afaik the scratch partition/location is only supported on fast storage due to the write activity, which could ruin SD/USB devices.
André
Hi,
the scratch partition is there, but it is stored in RAM - this is really VMware's countermeasure of the limited lifetime writes of low-tier NAND storage such as SD Cards or USB sticks. However if you really want to place it on the SD Card, I'd recommend with going the Support-recommended group of creating a datastore and placing it there.
Good luck!