Dedicated Servers - ESXi Partitioning – Articles

With OVHcloud dedicated servers, you can freely configure partitioning. This gives customers a wide range of options when installing an operating system. ESXi is an exception because it is a UNIX-based, proprietary system with a proprietary installer.
OVHcloud installations of ESXi are therefore compliant with the configuration set by the software publisher. Since ESXi 7.0, choosing between four different predefined partitioning layouts is possible. This guide will show you how to select a partitioning layout in the OVHcloud Control Panel or via the OVHcloud API.

ESXi 7.0 is often used as an example but this documentation is valid for any further versions of ESXi as well.

Requirements

A dedicated server ready to be installed/reinstalled in your OVHcloud account that is compatible with ESXi
Access to the OVHcloud Control Panel and/or the OVHcloud API

WARNING: Reinstalling a dedicated server deletes all data currently stored on it.

Instructions

ESXi 7.0 introduced a boot option to configure the size of ESXi system partitions because the increased size of the system partition could cause issues, especially on systems with small disks. OVHcloud includes this feature in the OVHcloud Control Panel and the OVHcloud API.

Even with multiple disks available on a server, the ESXi OS installation uses only the first disk of the targeted disk group. Other disks may be configured afterward to be used for virtual machines.

There are four different values:

Value	Systems size¹	Datastore³
`default`	130 GiB	All remaining space²
`min`	32 GiB	All remaining space²
`small`	64 GiB	All remaining space²
`max`	All available space²	❌⁴

¹ On the first disk of the targeted disk group for the OS installation.
² Space on the disk on which the OS will be installed.
³ A datastore is a disk partition (sometimes also called "container") that ESXi will use to store the virtual machines. More details.
⁴ Customers can still add a datastore afterward on the other disks.

As you can see, no datastore is created on the first disk with the max partitioning layout.

Did you know?

VMware on OVHcloud solutions is based on ESXi with the partitioning layout small.

How to select the partitioning scheme

The default partitioning scheme will be used unless another one is selected.

Via the OVHcloud Control Panel

The procedure is very similar to other operating systems, with the exception that you cannot tick the checkbox Customise the partitioning configuration and that you have a dropdown menu to choose the partitioning layout at the fourth and final step.

From the OVHcloud Control Panel:

Select Bare Metal Cloud from the top navigation bar.
Select your server under the Dedicated servers heading.
In the General Information in, click the more options ... button next to the operating system.
Click Install.

ds_esxi_partitioning01*.png

In the popup window, select Install from an OVHcloud template.

Click Next to continue.

ds_esxi_partitioning02*.png

Then choose Virtualisation, UNIX, and select the version of ESXi you want to install on your dedicated server.

The Customise the hardware RAID configuration option is only available if your dedicated server has a hardware RAID controller.

The Customise the partition configuration option is not available, for the above reasons.

Choose the disk group on which you want ESXi to be installed. Note that only the first disk of this group will be used to install the OS.

Click Next to continue.

ds_esxi_partitioning03*.png

In the Partitioning scheme dropdown menu, select the desired partitioning scheme. The overview is updated as soon as you select another partitioning scheme, so you can get an idea of how the partitioning will look like on your dedicated server.

Fill in the other details and click Confirm to start the ESXi installation on your dedicated server.

The Number of disks partitioned field is greyed out and set to 1, even if your server has more than 1 disk on the target disks group for OS installation, as explained above.

ds_esxi_partitioning04*.png

Via the OVHcloud API

When triggering an OS installation, the customer can optionally provide a partitionSchemeName to specify which partitioning layout must be used:

POST /dedicated/server/{serviceName}/install/start

Example of payload:

{
    "templateName": "esxi70_64",
    "partitionSchemeName": "small",
    "userMetadata": []
}

To list the different available partitioning schemes for an OVHcloud template, you can use the following API call:

GET /dedicated/installationTemplate/{templateName}/partitionScheme

For example, for esxi70_64 it will return:

[
"default"
"max"
"small"
"min"
]

To get the details of the partitioning scheme dynamically, you can use the following API call:

GET /dedicated/installationTemplate/{templateName}/partitionScheme/{schemeName}/partition

You can use the following API call to get the details for each partition:

GET /dedicated/installationTemplate/{templateName}/partitionScheme/{schemeName}/partition/{mountpoint}

Go further

For more information and tutorials, please see our other Dedicated Servers support guides or explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.

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