Table of Contents
Advertisement
•
Determine the most appropriate local disk partitioning scheme for ESX.
For more information, see "Disk Partitioning for ESX" on page 28.
•
If you are using the DRS or HA feature, determine the hosts that will be a
part of such a cluster and allocate shared storage accordingly.
•
Determine the appropriate networking configuration for Service Console,
virtual machines, and VMkernel. Virtual local area networks (VLANs)
can be used to efficiently isolate traffic.
Installing ESX
Prior to installation, complete the following configuration.
Setting up BIOS
Ensure that the BIOS is configured with the following settings:
•
Enable the Virtualization Technology (VT) feature. The VT feature is
required to run 64-bit VMs on Intel platforms.
•
Set the USB controller to USB on with BIOS Support, if available, on the
system. This enables support for USB devices both during and after the
ESX boot process.
Configuring Boot From SAN
ESX 4 supports Boot from SAN with both QLogic and Emulex Fibre
Channel adapters. For more information about configuring ESX to boot
from SAN, see the SAN Configuration Guide under VMware vSphere 4
at vmware.com/support/pubs.
Configuring RAID
Before installing ESX, ensure that the physical disks have the required RAID
configurations. Use the appropriate RAID level depending on the number of
local physical disks. RAID 0 is not recommended since it does not provide
data redundancy. ESX supports a maximum virtual disk size of 2 TB. RAID
groups can be split into multiple virtual disks.
Disk Partitioning for ESX
Table 4 lists the recommended disk partitioning for ESX. When installing
ESX, choose the Manual Partitioning option and follow the guidelines in
Table 4 to create the disk partitions.
28
ESX Deployment Guide
Advertisement
Table of Contents
