disk usage by ESXi 5 hypervisor?

Hello all, I am starting to prepare for the VCP5-DV exam. I'm going to have a million simple questions for which I can't find the answers in the docs and texts I own, so apologies in advance for that.

Here's my home virtual lab setup;
Client 5.5 running on desktop system
Workstation 10 running on desktop system
ESXi 5.5 virtual machine running within WS10

I created the ESXi VM with 1 CPU/2 cores, 4GB of RAM, 1 network adapter, 2 GB disk drive. I am planning to add a second virtual hard disk later for VMFS. It installed OK and runs, I can fart around in the DCUI and Client can see it OK. I was curious about how much actual disk space was consumed by the hypervisor. I am looking around in Client, and can see that the one hard disk is a 2 GB hard disk, and that there are 5 primary partitions (!) of 4, 250, 250, 0, and 286 MB.

What I can't find in Client is any sort of used/free hard disk metric. I assume I can get that data via vCLI, ESXi being a Unix/Linux derivative, but that seems ridiculously hard for such a simple task. Can this info be extracted from Client?

thx

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phonic

If you only have a single 2GB local drive, you are going to run into some issues.

ESXi 5 requires a minimum 1GB drive to boot from, but a minimum 5.2GB drive if you want to use it as a local datastore as well. In addition to the various partitions it creates, it also uses a 4GB scratch partition. If you used a 2GB drive, it can't create this.

The scratch partition is the biggest volume it needs by default, of which very little is used immediately. Outside of that, it also creates a few hundred meg ones for boot, etc.

So all in all, ESXi only uses about 350MB of space, but it requires significantly more than that if you want to do something with it. If you plan on using SAN/NAS storage for the VMs, you should be OK, but not if you want it all to run on one box. If so, I would suggest buying a bigger HDD.

jibbajabba

phonic is spot on .. in fact - VMware recommends at least 6GB ..

VMware KB: Recommended disk or LUN sizes for VMware ESX 3.x / 4.x and ESXi 3.x / 4.x / 5.x installations

dsp2267

Ah, good stuff. Keyword I should have been using is "recommended".

As an aside, for setups where ESXi loads from a thumb drive, the installer is going to pretty much insist on putting /scratch on a hard disk?

Essendon

The installer doesnt ask for a location, but you should specify the location of the scratch partition after the build. If you dont, logs are gone at reboot.

phonic

If you install to and then boot ESXi from a USB disk, then no scratch partition is created.

jibbajabba

phonic wrote: »

If you install to and then boot ESXi from a USB disk, then no scratch partition is created.

Plus he seems to run a nested lab where USB boot doesn't apply ...

dsp2267

Correct, I'm developing a nested lab, but I've always been curious about the enthusiasm for the USB boot setup on real production servers. It always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.

Verities

dsp2267 wrote: »

Correct, I'm developing a nested lab, but I've always been curious about the enthusiasm for the USB boot setup on real production servers. It always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.

The only problem with the USB boot is it's a single point of failure (SPOF) and you have to have extra USB drives sitting around in case that one fails. It's a bit of waste to install ESXi on the RAID but the added benefit of having redundancy outweighs the SPOF.

jibbajabba

If you are worried then go stateless altogether and boot from PXE

At the end of the day, once ESXi is booted - you could even pull the USB stick out ..

Or you go for decent quality and stick em straight onto the header - that even removes the wiggle factor

Never had one failing (using the 4GB variant)

QHalo

I use SD cards instead of USB drives. Cisco and Dell have redundant SD cards in their servers. Lose one, and the other will boot the server just fine. All my production servers boot this way.

jibbajabba

QHalo wrote: »

Cisco and Dell have redundant SD cards in their servers..

HP is going that way too ....

QHalo

If you don't boot from SAN, it's a super cheap way to provide redundancy. I think I paid $75 a card for the Cisco ones. But they're a bit different as they come with software on them.

Verities

In our environment we have ESXi installed on the RAID array. We use both Dell R900 as well as HP DL580 G7 models and they don't provide SD card redundancy. Must be newer models of servers you're talking about.

I understand going the USB way would probably be good for small businesses, but would not be good for large environments. If you really get into specifics, VMware products are geared towards the big environments anyways, what with all of the features along with the catastrophic licensing costs. If you're going to go small business you may as well go with Hyper-V or Xenserver (even OpenStack, if you're adventurous

emerald_octane

Yes not USB but dual SD cards in my dell boxes. Very enterprise like especially just having ESXi servers/heads with no local storage (other than SD ESXi) connected to remote storage.

QHalo

If you're small business you should probably be looking cloud instead.

Verities

QHalo wrote: »

If you're small business you should probably be looking cloud instead.

It all goes back to business needs and amount of funding available. Any business that solely relies on a cloud service provider probably hasn't thought about all possible solutions.

QHalo

Business needs sure. But eventually if you keep on-premise you're going to need someone to monitor and work on that equipment not to mention the cost of licensing it all. As a small business, it might be in their best interest to eliminate the majority of the capex costs and move to more predictable opex costs using cloud-based services with definable SLA's. Does it work for everyone? No, but I'm sure many small businesses have a hard time justifying all the blinky lights.

/derailed

dsp2267

I cannot currently access my ESXi 5.5 VM due to HW failure on my desktop. While I wait for the big brown truck to bring me a new mobo and CPU, can anyone answer my original question about disk usage?

And heck, why not post a screencap of what your host storage setup with SD card(s) looks like in Client. That's not something I'm going to find in the textbooks.

QHalo

You won't see the SD cards in client unless they have a VMFS partition. Which they won't.

dsp2267

That's interesting! So how would an admin know, from afar, that a particular ESXi host is booting off of SD rather than hard disk or SAN?

QHalo

Technically it should be documented and accessible by the appropriate personnel so you wouldn't have to go digging.

VMware KB: Identifying ESXi/ESX boot LUNs for Boot From SAN configurations
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1009931