I am a VMware neophyte so keep that in mind....I have a nifty new Dell R710 with 4 disks in a RAID10. The RAID 10 is, of course, one logical disk in the RAID BIOS. I also have a license for vSphere / ESX 4.0 so I went ahead and installed ESX in 'eval' mode to give it a whirl. I ran in to the oft-cited limitation of only being able to do 256GB virtual disks due to the default of 1MB block size on the volume where the virtual disks live....now given this is a new box I have no problem blowing away what's on it, reinstalling, whatever....but for the life of my I have not been able to figure out how to change the default block size in the ESX install. I've seen a few suggestions to install ESX itself on one disk and then re-format the other for the virtual disks...but this machine has one logical disk. We don't have a SAN yet so I really only have the locally attached disk in this machine to work with.
So how do I get myself a shiny new ESX 4.0 install with 4MB or even 8MB block size so I can make really really big vmdk's?
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You dont have to reinstall the esx datastore, just remove existing one and readd as new datastore with new block size
I dont see why you want to waste time to reinstall when readding is just 5mins :)
But ofcoz you need to backup all VMs if you already created in the datastore
The only way to change the default datastore block size using installer as i recall is to use scripted installation, whereby u specify the new block size in script file
Cheers!
hmmm i think you 100% are right, i overlooked esx as i did this in esxi, sorry about that :(
so you only left with the scripted installation http://blog.laspina.ca/ubi
For future users:
From PatrickD on VMTN Forums:
There isnt an easy way of doing that right now. Given that a number of people have asked for it were looking at adding it in future versions.
If you want to do this now, the only way to do it is by mucking around with the installer internals (and knowing how to use vi). Its not that difficult if youre familiar with using a command line. Try these steps for changing it with a graphical installation: boot the ESX installation DVD
switch to the shell (Ctrl-Alt-F2)
ps | grep Xorg
kill the PID which comes up with something like Xorg -br -logfile & .
On my system this comes up as PID 590, so kill 5903
cd /usr/lib/vmware/weasel
vi fsset.py
scroll down to the part which says class vmfs3FileSystem(FileSystem
edi
save and exit the file
cd /
/bin/weasel
After that, run through the installer as you normally would. To check that it worked, after the installer has completed you can go back to a different terminal (try Ctl-Alt-F3 since weasel is now running on tty2) and look through /var/log/weasel.log for the vmfstools creation command.
Hope that helps.
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by: za_mkhPosted on 2009-11-02 at 15:00:58ID: 25724683
I can't really recall it right now (time to sleep!) but you when installing ESX, if you choose the custom/advanced format, you can then configure the size of the partitions. Since the service console in vSphere is special VM (hence you need a VMFS partition), you should be able to choose a small partition size just for that, so if you had a 300GB volume, assign 20GB for VMFS (and leave the other space blank) Once ESX is up and running, you can then create a new datastore on the remaining space.
I think I got that right - but I could be wrong ...