So, I’ve had an issue creating VMFS partitions from the GUI on the ESX 3.02 servers that I have built.   Given that I didn’t have it create partitions at installation because I wanted a bigger block size (its an 800GB local disk, so I want one VM to be able to use at least a majority of it, and the default 1MB block size means a .vmdk file is limited to 256GB, too small) so I elected  to wait until after the ESX installation. Doing this greeted me with a great “There was an unexpected error updating the partition table.”  Great, thanks for that descriptive error. So, to the command line we go:

fdisk -l (check what the last partition is)

fdisk /dev/sda

n (new)

default (start block)

default (end block)

t (partition type)

10 (partition 10, just created)

fb (vmfs type)

w (write config)

reboot (Reboot the host before you format the newly created local partition)

vmkfstools -C vmfs3 /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba0:0:0:10

Go to VI Client, Refresh storage view and rename the newly created volume

W

You can align the VMFS volume as follows, before you do step 9:

X

b

1

128 (disk alignment, check your SAN manual for the correct value, 128 is correct in most cases…)

Now I need to figure out how to set blocksize while running that command and I will be set.

#vmkfstools –C vmfs3 –b 2M vmhba1:0:0:2

Found it.

–Nat