Partition recommendations for an Ubuntu server running VMware Server?

[GOSSSAMER]

Hi All,

I presently have an Ubuntu server 64-bit running VMware Server 2.0 in a test lab.
The server was created using the default partitioning method during the installation. So I have what I think is just one huge 300GB partition along with what I hear is a uselessly large swap partition.

I keep reading that theres an advantage to creating dedicated partitions, especially for the the VM datastore.

If the advantages are true then I would like to re-partition the drive.

What do you guys recommend?

What partitions should I define and how big should the be?

[coopstah13]

just curious about your setup, perhaps you should just use ESX server instead of vmware server edition, but i guess it depends on what else this machine is running (but could probably just run in a VM on esx!)

[GOSSSAMER]

Is ESX free?

This server will do nothing but host VMs.

[GOSSSAMER]

What do you guys think of this config?

/ - 30 G
/boot - 300 Megs - this just for kernel, <-- is this big enough?
/swap - 16 G <-- I keep reading on how this may be to big. 2GB being the max
/var - the rest of the drive for VMs, logs and database stuff

[coopstah13]

ESX is free, if you are just hosting VM's it will be preferred, because it is a very lightweight distro built only to run the VMs

[GOSSSAMER]

I cant find the ESX download. I think ESX is no longer supported.

[oz]

What do you guys think of this config?

/ - 30 G
/boot - 300 Megs - this just for kernel, <-- is this big enough?
/swap - 16 G <-- I keep reading on how this may be to big. 2GB being the max
/var - the rest of the drive for VMs, logs and database stuff

Hello and welcome to the forums!

a root partition of 30GB should be plenty, depending on what all you'll be doing with it. my entire system can run on 12GB with room to spare

300MB for /boot is far more than large enough

16GB for swap sounds excessive... if you have lots of RAM, you might not need any swap. the old rule about double the RAM for the proper swap size doesn't always apply these days. still, for a server, it would be a good idea to have some swap space

maybe the others here will chime in with some other thoughts on it

[coopstah13]

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/ind...free-esxi&lp=1

[GOSSSAMER]

Hello and welcome to the forums!

a root partition of 30GB should be plenty, depending on what all you'll be doing with it. my entire system can run on 12GB with room to spare

300MB for /boot is far more than large enough

16GB for swap sounds excessive... if you have lots of RAM, you might not need any swap. the old rule about double the RAM for the proper swap size doesn't always apply these days. still, for a server, it would be a good idea to have some swap space

maybe the others here will chime in with some other thoughts on it

Thanks for the reply Ozar.

I just dont want to run out of space down the road when adding VMs to this machine.

[filfish]

In my experience with VM server and ESX, it is much better to put each VM Client on a separate disk or raid set rather than partition if at all possible.

while using only one disk it is advantageous to keep your vm clients on a separate partition in case you need to rebuild the host, but performance wise there is no benefit.

Each VM Client will want to read and write to it's own disk (a flat file on your main HDD) this will happen as and when your disk has available read/writes, the more systems you have running the more reads and writes are requested of the disk, meaning that each system has to wait longer for each request to be processed and written to disk.

Disk I/O is almost always the bottle neck on home built VM setups.

If it's only for testing and playing around it's perfectly fine, but in a production environment, i'd try to stump up for some more disks.