Comments on: Changing the block size of your local VMFS during the install…

By: jro

jro — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:54:51 +0000

Andrew, add !

:wq!

By: Johan E

Johan E — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:20:07 +0000

Thanks! This step-by-step where really helpful for us!

By: Andrew G

Andrew G — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:10:11 +0000

My experience is as follows:

ESX 4 Update 1
Dell R710 with 6 drives, raid 5, one Virtual Disk

fsset.py, readonly.. didn’t get a chance to get around that.
Could not find Xorg in the ps list.

My solution was to wipe the raid config and create 2 virtual disks..

Other option was to install ESX on a USB stick (internal slot on Dell r710s) however I need the service console and that requires minimum 9.2GBs which i didn’t have on USB.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:39:03 +0000

I too am getting syuck on the Readonly of fsset.py, can anyone advise

By: Forbes Guthrie

Forbes Guthrie — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:37:10 +0000

I’ve taken Gabe’s solution above and added it to a kickstart script:
http://www.vreference.com/2010/01/11/create-local-vmfs-with-8mb-block-size-during-esx4-kickstart-install/
Just thought this might help someone.
Forbes.

By: Sven

Sven — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:27:14 +0000

@Travis Kreikemeier

I tried what you recommend. But after installing esx4 I can’t create e second one by VI Client.

Best regards, Sven

By: Travis Kreikemeier

Travis Kreikemeier — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:20:32 +0000

The best solution is to create two virtual disks on your RAID card. They can be in the same RAID group if needed. Make the first one 15GB and the second can consume the rest of the available space of the RAID.

Then install ESX 4 on the first 15GB virtual disk (VD / LUN). Once the install is complete and you have VIC or VCenter connected, add new storage datastore and use the 2nd VD, format it with VMFS and blocksize of your liking (Usually 4MB or 8MB).

The other beauty to this is that you can always reinstall ESX 4 anytime without disrupting your datastore with the VMs.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:54:16 +0000

Hi Duncan and everyone

I am not an IT pro. I dont know anything about linux. I would like to know if I do this right. Please be excuse this is a noob question.

I boot the ESX4 install DVD. Then I choose graphical mode. I waited until the first GUI screen which let me click next. I press Alt Ctrl F2 to enter console. I input ps | grep Xorg and get “496 root 88608 S /usr/bin/Xorg -logfile /tmp/X.log :1 vt6 -config /tmp”. So I input kill 496.
cd /usr/lib/vmware/weasel
vi fsset.py

I vi the file and it got a [readonly] tag. I am not able to save the file when I done editing.

Please let me know what part i am doing wrong. Thanks for your time.

Chris

By: Gabrie van Zanten

Gabrie van Zanten — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:04:39 +0000

Another method of changing the blocksize is posted on my blog. It comes down to first installing an extra partition as empty vmfs datastore and then reformat it using vmkfstools.

See my blog: http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=728

Gabrie

By: lamw

lamw — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:44:43 +0000

Hey Duncan,

Great info! I was wondering where this might have been hard coded within the installer. You actually gave me an idea on how one might be able to change the default block size via kickstart but unfortunately we were not able to test since we had some issues in our build environment.

I think you should be able to add the following as a “pre” script to change fsset.py after the ks.cfg is parsed and hopefully before the datastore is created:

%pre –interpreter=bash

sed -i ’s/blockSizeMB = 1/blockSizeMB = 8/g’ /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/fsset.py

–William Lam