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I have rebuilt my IBM x360 server.

Now, I am reinstalling my VMware ESX Server 3 on it, and I have the following drive arrays:

  1. Array A is set of 3 36GB U160 (directly on server, channel 1 of my IBM ServeRAID 6M)
  2. Array B is set of 6 146GB U320 (on my EXP300)

  3. Array C is set of 2 73GB U320 (on my EXP300)

    • Array A is RAID 5.
    • Array B is RAID 5EE.
    • Array C is RAID 1.

Now, I'm at the step of configuring the partitions. I have found the following which seems to look good:

Planning Partitions for ESX Server 2.5 (1506)

Based on this knowledge base article, I thought of doing the following:

Mount Point | File System Type | Size(MB) | Add. Size Opt. | Force Primary Partition
      /boot        |           ext3              |  192MB    |     Fixed size      |             Select
       N/A         |           swap             |   384MB   |     Fixed size      |            Select
      /(root)      |           ext3               |  1800MB  |     Fixed size      |            Select
      /home      |           ext3               |  1800MB  |     Fixed size      |       Do not select
   /vmimages  |           ext3               | 10000MB |     Fixed size      |       Do not select
       N/A         |       vmkcore            |   100MB   |     Fixed size      |       Do not select
       N/A         |          vmfs2             |   RoDisk   |     Fill to max.     |       Do not select

  • Array A: /boot, N/A-swap, /(root) and /home
  • Array B: vmfs2
  • Array C: /vmimages

Are my partitioning intentions looking good?

ewwhite
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Will Marcouiller
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1 Answers1

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This is unfortunate. The version of the software you're using and the age of the hardware you're using are old enough that it's difficult to give proper assistance and support...

Sure, your partitioning plan is fine, but the larger problem is that you're deploying anew on antiquated equipment with end-of-life software.

It is time to plan for an upgrade. Systems dating back to 2007 are capable of running the current revisions of VMware, so I'd strongly advise investing or making the case for more current equipment.

ewwhite
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  • After some days of investigating for workarounds for this and that encountered trouble, I now agree with your conclusion. I thought that my x360 (4x Xeon 2GHz/8 GB RAM ECC) would have done the job. In fact, it is not clearly hardware problems, my server works just fine. The troubles I encounter are especially around software incompatibilities with my hardware when I try to install VM with more recent OSes than what we were using back in 2004. I shall then invest for a x460 64 bit server and use vSphere 5.5 instead. Thanks! – Will Marcouiller Nov 28 '13 at 19:25