the vmfs3 partition was created fine with a capacity of 1.4TB.Manual repartitioning
Before losing too many words, I let you know from the begin: THIS WORKS. You can continue to read on, hopefully with big eyes and a smile on your face...
Now to the funny part! The following instructions are advanced system commands. Do not do them on a production machine, only on a newly installed ESXi 4.1 machine which doesn't host any virtual machines yet.
First we have to find the correct disk, for which ESXi has given a special name. Use the following commands to find your local disk. Note that I have cut the full output, I only show the local disk information (the full output would also contain CD drive, attached iSCSI or SAN disks, etc.).
To run the following commands, you need to enable SSH. You can do this on the ESXi console in Troubleshooting.
This shows the disk name (naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d) and the LUN name (vmhba1:C2:T0:L0):
# esxcfg-mpath -b
naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d : Local DELL Disk (naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d)
vmhba1:C2:T0:L0 LUN:0 state:active Local HBA vmhba1 channel 2 target 0
With the following command we see even more information and what we need is also here: The device path which we will use as the local disk identifier in the next commands:
# esxcfg-scsidevs -l
naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d
Device Type: Direct-Access Size: 3000704 MB Display Name: Local DELL Disk (naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d) Multipath Plugin: NMP Console Device: /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d Vendor: DELL Model: PERC 5/i Revis: 1.03 SCSI Level: 5 Is Pseudo: false Status: on Is RDM Capable: false Is Removable: false Is Local: true Other Names: vml.02000000006001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d504552432035 VAAI Status: unknown
Disk /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d: 3146.4 GB, 3146466197504 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 3000704 cylinders, total 6145441792 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Check your current partition table and note down the number of partition which is used for VMFS (by default it should be p3):
# fdisk -l
The next step is to delete the automatically created vmfs3 partition using the fdisk command:
fdisk -u /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-8): 3
Command (m for help): w
Now we create a new partition and change its type to VMFS. When fdisk asks for the last sector (=size) of the new partition, we enter +2097152M (which is 2TB):
fdisk -u /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d
Command (m for help): n
Command action
l logical (5 or over)
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Selected partition 3
First sector (10229760-1850474495, default 10229760): 10229760
Last sector or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (10229760-4294967294, default 4294967294): +2097152M
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-8): 3
Hex code (type L to list codes): fb
Changed system type of partition 3 to fb (VMFS)
Command (m for help): w
Now we check again the partition table to verify the changes:
# fdisk -l
/dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00dp1 5 900 917504 5 Extended /dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00dp2 901 4995 4193280 6 FAT16 /dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00dp3 4996 2004996 2047999936+ fb VMFS /dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00dp4 * 1 4 4080 4 FAT16 <32M /dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00dp5 5 254 255984 6 FAT16 /dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00dp6 255 504 255984 6 FAT16 /dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00dp7 505 614 112624 fc VMKcore /dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00dp8 615 900 292848 6 FAT16
Now the new partition has to be formatted to a VMFS3. This can be done with the following command where -b is standing for the filesystem blocksize. Here I use 8M which is currently the biggest blocksize and made for big vmdk files. Note that the partition number has to be given, therefore the :3 at the end:
# vmkfstools -C vmfs3 -b 8M -S datastore1 /dev/disks/naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d:3
Checking if remote hosts are using this device as a valid file system. This may take a few seconds...
Creating vmfs3 file system on "naa.6001e4f01c94d50013d852397c7ef00d:3" with blockSize 8388608 and volume label "datastore1".
Successfully created new volume: 4c45bc40-6aa5a458-e509-001e4f2a6fac
Congratulations, the new VMFS datastore with a size of 2TB has been created on your ESXi 4.1 machine.
Unfortunately this still doesn't use the whole disk space of 2.86 TB but I figured this out too, however I do not recommend to do it (it could cause system instability) and you should be an advanced systems engineer to do it...
Update Oct 22 2010: As of now the ESXi server in question is still running with this manual partition, there have no instabilities been detected and ESXi is running just fine. However, I don't know what would happen if a patch has to be installed or an upgrade to a newer version (future releases) is pushed. Due to the manual partitioning I just don't know what the ESXi patch/upgrade setup would do.
If you really want to use the whole disk space, do the following tasks:
- Boot with your favorite Rescue CD and launch a partitioning tool (I used Knoppix 6.2 and started Gparted).
- Copy the data of the partition /dev/sda2 (the one with size 4GB and which is FAT16-formatted) to another partition. You will find three folders in this partition: downloads, log, var.
- Then delete /dev/sda2 in Gparted.
- Expand/Resize the extended partition up to a size of 1.5TB (you can try to use the full disk space, but it won't work due to a maximum extended partition size).
- Create a new logical partition within the extended partition with a size of 4GB and format it FAT16 - so we recreate the partition which we deleted before.
- Restore the files you copied to another partition before back to the new partition.
- Now create another new logical partition within the extended partition and use the rest of the extended partition space, do not format it (unformatted) - this will be the first vmfs partition.
- Create a new primary partition and use the rest of the harddisk, do not format it (unformatted) - this is our second vmfs partition.
- Once all this is done, restart your machine and boot ESXi.
- Once logged in back with SSH, you have to format the two new created partitions with the vmkfstools command (see above). Use fdisk -l to see the new partitions.
You might ask, what happened to the deleted /dev/sda2 (4GB, FAT16) since its partition name changed (in my case to /dev/sda9)? ESXi doesn't seem to work with a mount file like /etc/fstab and nowhere in the system I could find a mount table. But without doing anything, ESXi started to write the logs (like messages) into /dev/sda9 into the log folder. So even though this partition name has changed, somehow ESXi still recognizes it as the log partition. Now there are two local vmfs datastores on the ESXi 4.1 machine, one with 1.41TB, the other one with 1.45TB.
Mission accomplished.
