vSphere Service Console and Disk Partitioning
Everyone at this point should be aware that the Service Console is now located in a vmdk on a VMFS partition. The Service Console vmdk must be stored on a vmfs datastore and the datastore must either be local stoage or SAN storage that is only presented to the one host. So I guess no shared vmfs datastores to house all the Service Consoles……. The next question I had about the new service console was the /boot partition. Where is it and how is the server bootstrapping? Well I can’t say I have totally gotten to the bottom of this yet but I have discovered a few things. When digging into scripting installations of vSphere I first looked at the disk partitioning which sheds a little light on the boot process. Here is what the disk partitioning portion of the script looks like:
part /boot –fstype=ext3 –size= –onfirstdisk
part storage1 –fstype=vmfs3 –size=30000 –grow –onfirstdisk
part None –fstype=vmkcore –size=100 –onfirstdisk
# Create the vmdk on the cos vmfs partition.
virtualdisk cos –size=8000 –onvmfs=storage1
# Partition the virtual disk.
part / –fstype=ext3 –size=0 –grow –onvirtualdisk=cos
part swap –fstype=swap –size=1600 –onvirtualdisk=cos
