ESXi boot from USB drive view USB drive space

I guess the free space would be displayed on the Summary Screen once you have logged in using vSphere Client.

That gives the information about the datastores, but the USB drive doesn't show up there as it's just a boot device and is never really setup as a datastore.

Here's help on how to enable SSH:
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/08/10/howto-esxi-and-ssh/

~coolsport00

I found out that for ESX, you can run:
vdf -h

...and it looks cleaner. But, for ESXi that command doesn't work. The only thing I've found you can run in ESXi is the fdisk command I mention above.

~coolsport00

How do I tell how much free space there is from this capture?
Capture.JPG

How big is your USB drive?

~coolsport00

I believe it is 2GB, and I can see that from this command, just not sure how much is used and how much is free.  I also tried the "df -h" command and that shows me info too, but more or less the usages of each partition and not free space on the whole drive.

Ok...yes..was just making sure...cuz I saw the 2000MB (2GB), but didn't see the 'free' space. I have different output that you do (slightly); what version of ESXi are you running?

Also...may I ask why you're inquiring about how much space is left on your flash drive? The reason I ask is because it should never increase. Nothing ever gets added to the OS (hypervisor)...well, unless you need to add a driver for something (which is extremely rare). Regardless, I still wanna help you achieve what you're inquiring in this post about... :)

~coolsport00

This is for ESX4i.  I understand the reasoning about why would I need to know because the space never changes, but I had a former colleague ask me how (not sure why they need to know) and it has been bugging me since I couldn't figure it out...

Ha...you're like me...you're now on a vendetta to figure it out! :P

what version of esxi are you on?

ESXi 4

Are you using the Free version or the licensed version of ESXi 4 ?

Provide a screenshot after using:
df -h

When I used "df -h", I get:
Size     Used     Available    Use%    Mounted On

..headings for each partition. Do you not get that? I ran that command on my ESXi4 host.

~coolsport00

Here's the VMware KB I referenced for the syntax:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003564

df -h is service console partions, or in the case of ESXi, the boot/hypervisor partitions. It also shows the VMFS volumes (in ESXi).

For ESX, you use the same command, but for VMFS volumes, you use vdf -h.

Regards,
~coolsport00

Here is the output from df -h.  It gives the output of all the disk partitions and then how much free space is in each partition.  The boot USB drive has several partitions, so I suppose I could add them up and then subtract from 2GB and get something close.  I just thought there would be a more simple way to find this out.  Maybe this is it though.
Capture.JPG

I guess other than the VMFS3 and NFS, all other partitions are ESXi Partitions.

Yes, that is the best that can be done; I guess since you're using a USB disk, the display is a bit different because mine shows my boot volume. Well...it doesn't have an asterisk by that volume, I just know the size/free space of mine. My ESXi install is on the same disk as a datastore. But yes...that is about all you can show within ESXi, or ESX for that matter (according to the KB). Just discount your VMFS (or NFS as you have 1) partitions and there is your total, used, & available space.

~coolsport00