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I've a HP N54L Microserver with an ESXi, which runs from the 16GB USB Stick. In vSphere client I can't see any volumes, where I can store my VMs. And I think that ESXi never needs 16 GB to work.

Is it possible to repartition my stick so I have some space (~10GB) on it to store my VMs?

I gooogled around but found no answer (maybe I used not exact keywords).

ewwhite
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Maximilian Wiens
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2 Answers2

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Nope. If you use a USB or flash-based media or a disk partition of 5GB or less, VMware will install in "embedded mode" instead of "installable mode". This is tuned for flash deployments and minimizes the number of writes to the media; basically running ESXi out of the system's RAM.

If you need persistent storage space for your VMs, I suggest using your disks. The HP ProLiant Microserver can accommodate standard and solid-state disks.

Also see: What happens when the USB key or SD card I've installed VMware ESXi on fails?

Community
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ewwhite
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You can't and really, really shouldn't. VMFS is an entirely different filesystem than ESXi's underlying filesystem (ext4 I believe).

While it may be possible to partition the drive to have one for ESXi and one for your VMs, doing so is highly discouraged...you'd maybe get one VM on there maximum and you'd wear out the drive in short order because VMs are known to be I/O intensive.

Nathan C
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