How to change (increase) size of ESXi system partitions?

[specator]

Hi all!

After installing ESXi host I got his partition table:

[root@esx:~] df -h

Filesystem   Size   Used Available Use% Mounted on

vfat       285.8M 172.9M    112.9M  60% /vmfs/volumes/5c52dbe5-9ee717e2-6f58-3a9fa14000ba

vfat       249.7M 227.3M     22.4M  91% /vmfs/volumes/5039b0eb-245b9a3e-d595-58efc249425a

vfat       249.7M 232.6M     17.1M  93% /vmfs/volumes/07ac5fe1-e6780032-5912-27bc4b104cad

[root@esx:~] partedUtil getptbl "/vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0"

gpt

968 255 63 15564800

1 64 8191 C12A7328F81F11D2BA4B00A0C93EC93B systemPartition 128

5 8224 520191 EBD0A0A2B9E5443387C068B6B72699C7 linuxNative 0

6 520224 1032191 EBD0A0A2B9E5443387C068B6B72699C7 linuxNative 0

7 1032224 1257471 9D27538040AD11DBBF97000C2911D1B8 vmkDiagnostic 0

8 1257504 1843199 EBD0A0A2B9E5443387C068B6B72699C7 linuxNative 0

mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 - Is a 8GB SD card.

Now I want to increase size of partition to be able to install VMWare updates (there no spase to prestage them). How I can do this? Is this only way is a reinstalling ESXi host?

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

VMware Knowledge Base

ARomeo

[specator]

Hi,

Clearly no. I want increase size not for VM. I want to change partitioning for ESXi itself. Please read carefully.

[Alex_Romeo]

http://www.vmwarearena.com/what-i-wish-everyone-knew-about-esxi-partition/

[specator]

There only description for what each partition is needed, but there no information regarding my initial question - how to increase size of those partitions?

[Scottkche123]

Add or delete an ESXi server from a VMware VMFS volume without disrupting other ESXi servers.

[a_p_]

Do you have an issue with the sizes, or why would you want to increase them?

ESXi contains two bootbank partitions , which - as shown in your output - are indeed pretty much filled. However, they are not required for staging updates.

I'm pretty sure that - in case it's necessary to have larger partitions - VMware will take care of this, as they did in the past.

André

[specator]

I just want to install updates from update manager form vCenter. But this fails because of small amount of free space to stage all required updates. Also we got the same error when we had tried to update NSX modules on the same server.

[specator]

What do you mean under that? I do not need to increase space for VMs storage. I need to increase space available for ESXi itself.

[marcseguin]

Hi there, did somebody found an answer to the question on how to increase the size of the bootbank partion?

[continuum]

I figured out how to create larger BOOTBANK partitions and boot ESXi from there - but so far I found no tool that can do a growfs function.