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terrible_towel
Contributor
Contributor

/scratch partition on 5.5 install on 16GB SD card

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

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2 Replies
a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Afaik the scratch partition/location is only supported on fast storage due to the write activity, which could ruin SD/USB devices.

André

Alistar
Expert
Expert

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!

Stop by my blog if you'd like 🙂 I dabble in vSphere troubleshooting, PowerCLI scripting and NetApp storage - and I share my journeys at http://vmxp.wordpress.com/
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