Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
I had a conversation with some colleagues of mine about ESX local disk partitioning and some interesting questions were raised.
How many are creating local vmfs storage on their ESX servers?
How many actually use that local vmfs storage?
Typically it is frowned upon to store vm’s on local vmfs because you loose the advances features of ESX such as vMotion, DRS, and HA. So if you don’t run vm’s from the local vmfs, then why create it? Creating this local datastore promotes it’s use just by being there. If you’re short on SAN space and need to deploy a vm and can’t wait for the SAN admins to present you more storage, what do you do? I’m sure more frequently than not you deploy to the local storage to fill the need for the vm. I’m also sure that those at least 20% of the time those vm’s continue to live there.
Is the answer to not utilize local vmfs storage? If you don’t what do you do with the left over space? Not all servers are created equal, sometimes servers have different size local drives so you have a few options. Do you create standards for your partitioning and set a partition such as / to grow and have varying configurations amongst your hosts? Or do you create a standard for all partition sizes and leave the rest of the space raw?
Typically this is the partition scheme I use for all deployments I do.
Boot = 250 (Primary)
Swap = 1600 (Primary)
/ = Fill (Primary)
/var = 4096 (Extended)
/opt = 4096 (Extended)
/tmp =4096 (Extended)
/home =4096 (Extended)
vmkcore = 100 (Extended)
This configuration will create inconsistencies amongst hosts with varying drive sizes. To maintain consistency I could do something like the following and leave the rest of the space raw.
Boot = 250 (Primary)
Swap = 1600 (Primary)
/ = 8192 (Primary)
/var = 4096 (Extended)
/opt = 4096 (Extended)
/tmp =4096 (Extended)
/home =4096 (Extended)
vmkcore = 100 (Extended)
I’m a fan for utilizing all the space you have available, but others like consistency. What is your preference? Weight in an let us know.
I use almost the same; after reading multiple docs, blogs and forum posts, I came to a general finger in the air consensus of;
/boot = 250 (ext3, primary)
swap = 1600 (swap, primary)
/ = 8192 (ext3, primary)
vmkcore = 100 (extended)
/var = 4096 (ext3, extended)
/tmp = 4096 (ext3, extended)
/opt = 4096 (ext3, extended)
/home = 2048 (ext3, extended)
This fits most hardware, but I suppose those sizes could be increased for “modern” disk sizes. I’ve probably got 1/2 the 72GB HDDs empty on the current project.