Evaluation Datastore 8GB

[Lee Davila]

Hi, I've installed an evaluation copy of ESXi on a nice Dell R720 which has at least 130GB hard drive, with a 1TB data drive. I logged in the Center only to see that the 'datastore1' is 8GB! Did I miss something or really bungle on the install?

TIA!

[a_p_]

It looks like you are evaluating ESXi 7.0 which consumes up to ~130GB on the installation disk by default.

For lab/evaluation purposes you can reduce that, by limiting the OSDATA partition size by appending e.g. autoPartitionOSDataSize=24576 to the boot option while installing ESXi 7.0.

see e.g. https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2020/05/changing-the-default-size-of-the-esx-osdata-volume-in-esxi-7-0.html

André

[IRIX201110141]

The ESXi installer creates a default datastore with the rest of the space from the disk which you have ESXi installed on (It depends on if you use a SD/USB or other kind of media). If you use ESXi 7.0 than there is a new partition layout and ESXi claims up to 120GB as a OSDATA disk, a few GBs for the boot banks and the rest is used for the default datastore.

If your Dell server have a RAID controller you need to create a RAID0 for our additional disk. After that "vDisk" is created on PERC level you have to create a new Datastore by pressing the "New Datastore button. You have to follow the wizzard to create a 1TB VMFS 6.0 filesystem.

Regards,
Joerg