Vmware ESX Host Drive Space Best Practice

We recently had Vmware technicians come in to analyze our environment we had configured and tell us what needed changed and give us best practices for VMware in our environment. It was through Dell and ultimately there is a Virtualization Healthcheck tool that will go through and tell you the majority of this. That tool runs as a Guest OS host in your VMware enviroment.

This particular post lays out what optimum settings for virtual disk size when setting up and ESX 4.0 host. This is one setting that needs to be done before you go much further since changing it pretty much requires a rebuild of the ESX host.

Here are the settings we ended up using.

• /boot - ext3 1100MB (PreConfigured Space for upgrades)
• - swap 1600+MB (Change for maximum services console swap)
• / - ext3 16384 MB (Change for additional space in root)
• /var - ext3 8192 MB (Create this partition to avoid overfilling root with log files)
• /tmp - ext3 8192 MB (Create this partition to avoid overfilling root with temp files)
• /opt - ext3 8192 MB (Create this partition to avoid overfilling root with VMware HA log files)
• - vmkcore 100MB (Memory Dump for PSOD - Note I didn't have this option)
• Leave all remaining space on the local volume unpartitioned

That is the first major setup best practice that isn't immediately obvious by going through the steps, more to follow including network setup and reasoning since that is one of the toughest ones in our experience.