VMWare: ESX Server Partitioning

I have had a few servers core dump and drop over 5 gigs of data to /var/core.  Before, per “best practices” a vendor recommended around 4 gigs for /var.  I upped that to 6 gigs originally, but after 2 servers had /var 100% utilized I and revising that.  /var is still 6 gigs but /var/core has been broken out into its own mount point.  15 gigs is a little high, but these servers had raid 1 – 73 gig hard drives.  At least now if the servers core dump it will affect only its mount point.  I highly recommend doing this!

Below is how I am partitioning ESX servers during the local installs from now on

Mount Point Size(m) Partition type
/boot 250 Primary
/ 10240 Primary
swap 1600 Primary *max
/var 6142 Extended
/var/core 15360 Extended
/opt 2048 Extended
/home 2048 Extended
/tmp 1024 Extended
vmkcore 109 *max

Note: The *max references to the mount point being at the max size limit for ESX v3*.  The total size of this install is ~36 gigs.  If you have smaller drives, just decrease /var/core.  All the rest, I would keep close to the same.

Update:  Here is an example of why /var/core now has its own filesystem

[user@vm user]$ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 9.9G 1.2G 8.3G 13% /
/dev/sda1 244M 27M 205M 12% /boot
/dev/sda8 2.0G 341M 1.6G 18% /home
/dev/sda7 2.0G 81M 1.8G 5% /opt
none 391M 0 391M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda9 1012M 33M 928M 4% /tmp
/dev/sda6 6.0G 327M 5.3G 6% /var
/dev/sda5 15G 15G 0 100% /var/core

Never lost vpxa or mgmt-vmware (hostd) this time!

~ by Kevin Goodman on October 31, 2008.

Posted in Filesystems, VMWare
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

2 Responses to “VMWare: ESX Server Partitioning”

  1. Thanks for posting this.

    Roger L
    http://rogerlunditblog.blogspot.com/

    Roger Lund said this on December 16, 2008 at 6:18 pm

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