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Brijn
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vSphere installer. How to change block size or Datastore size during install

Hi,

I'm installaing vSphere on a server with one 800G R5 volume. In advanced install I don't see options to either set blocksize or datastore size. By default it's 1MB + full disk. This leaves me with a VMDK limit of 256G. I need more, what is the best way to change the datastore to 4MB block size. I thought I'd just drop the standrd DS and add a new one. But you can';t do that because the Service COnsole is on it. You also can't shrink it seems.

I'll go and try to see if I can copy the console files off via sftp and then reformat and copy back. But I have the feeling that might nbot work Smiley Happy

I was hoping to run a P2V overnight.. But changes are getting small it seems Smiley Wink

Bas

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Using interactive installation is not possible change the block size from the default (1M).

You can split your disk in a "small" disk and a large one (to format it later with custom block size).

Maybe in unattended mode there is a way to set the block size...

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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Brijn
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Hi,

Do you mean actual disks as presented to ESX (ie to be done at RAID card level) or as partitions on that disk. If you refer to partitions, how would i go about that. Because I don't think I saw options for that

I'll also open a ticket with VMware, because this is way harder then it should be

Bas

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Do you mean actual disks as presented to ESX (ie to be done at RAID card level) or as partitions on that disk.

As two different logical disks.

Most of RAID controller can create multiple logical disks on the same set of RAID group.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Take a look at this thread:

Changing blocksize instructions

If you're comfortable working on the command line it's fairly easy to do. Changing the size of the datastore is not quite so easy (and frankly, if you want to migrate to ESXi at some point, I wouldn't recommend it).

Brijn
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

In the end I managed to make all my VMDK < 256G so I"m OK. Suprised that VMware does not offer the functionality to change it in the installer. I'll keep your "weasel" trick in mind for future installs!

Tx

Bas

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Yeah. We didn't really anticipate people stuffing big VMs onto the volume along with the COS VMDK. We figured that people making virtual machines that big would probably use 2 LUNs (one dedicated for booting, the other for the virtual machines). Regardless, though, we're looking at fixing it in a future release.

Thanks,

--Patrick.

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Brijn
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Enthusiast

Hi,

To give you an idea why I was doing it: It was a machine I needed to P2V. In the end I managed to delete enough stuff of it to < 250G

This was in a site office with an existing 1 server install (FS, Exch, DC etc).

Tx

Bas

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