Wednesday, December 21, 2011

How to create a vmfs file system with ESXI 5.0

Starting with 5.0,  a new utility/command called partedUtil is used to partition disks. GPT allows the extent to exceed the 2TB limitation found in previous versions of esxi with older versions of vmfs.

What follows are the instructions on how to partition a lun and create a file system.

Step # 1: Type the command with the -h option to learn about the syntax.
partedUtil -h

Step # 2: Access the directory with the disks and get the attributes of a particular disk
cd /vmfs/devices/disks ; ls
partedUtil get naa.device_name_here

Note: The output should be a set of four numbers. For example: 1044 255 63 16777216
These numbers represent the number of cylinders, the head cound, the number of sectors per track
and the total number of sectors of the device

Step # 3: Partition the disk
partedUtil set naa.device_name_here "1 2048 16700000 251 128"

Note: These numbers represent the partition number (1), the starting sector (2048),
the last sector(16700000), the partition type (251=vmfs) and an attribute (128=bootable).

Step # 4: Create a file system using that first partition
vmkfstools -C vmfs5 -S myfs -b 1M naa.device_name_here:1   <- 1=partition number to use