During install vSphere now creates a VMFS partition by default on the local storage on which the service console partitions will be installed. When you want to use this partition to store your VMs on (non-VMotionable) there is no problem, just point to this datastore and use it. In my homelab the ESX hosts have very cheap but big local disks. With only 8GB or 10GB occupied by ESX, I had around 600GB left on that local disk. I wanted to use it to store some large VMDKS on it, but couldn’t because of the 1MB blocksize which doesn’t allow me to make disks bigger then 256GB. Since the COS is running on the VMFS you can’t just reformat it. (more…)
We all know that the future version of vSphere will probably only be the ESXi version. At least, this is what VMware’s aim is for ESX5. Because it is wise to already get used to ESXi now to get more familiar with the absence of the Service Console, I was trying to switch my home lab of three ESX hosts to ESXi. While preparing for this I ran into some compatibility issues with appliances that don’t support ESXi (yet). (more…)
