8.0

Table Of Contents
Table 4-1. ESXi system storage partitions: (continued)
Partition Use Type
Boot-bank 1 System space to store ESXi boot modules. FAT16
ESX-OSData Acts as the unified location to store additional modules.
Not used for booting and virtual machines.
Consolidates the legacy /scratch partition, locker partition for VMware Tools, and
core dump destinations.
Caution In case the installation media is a USB or an SD card device, best practice
is to create ESX-OSData partitions on persistent storage device that is not shared
between ESXi hosts.
VMFS-L
The ESX-OSData volume is divided into two high-level categories of data, persistent and non-
persistent data. Persistent data contains of data written infrequently, for example, VMware Tools
ISOs, configurations, and core dumps.
Non-persistent data contains of frequently written data, for example, logs, VMFS global traces,
vSAN Entry Persistence Daemon (EPD) data, vSAN traces, and real-time databases.
Figure 4-1. Consolidated system storage in ESXi 8.0
boot-bank 0
system boot
boot-bank 1
small core-dump
scratch
VMFS datastore
boot-bank 0
system boot
boot-bank 1
VMFS datastore
ESX-OS Data
ROM data RAM data
4 MB
250 MB
250 MB
110 MB
286 MB
2.5 GB
4 GB
(created if media > 8.5 GB
not created on USB flash drive)
locker
large core-dump
(created if media > 3.4 GB)
ESXi 6.x
system storage layout
ESXi 7.0 and later
system storage layout
100 MB
500 MB to 4 GB,
(depending on the
size of the used
boot media)
500 MB to 4 GB,
(depending on the
size of the used
boot media)
remaining space,
up to 128 GB
remaining space,
(for media size > 142 GB)
ESXi System Storage Sizes
Partition sizes, except for the system boot partition, can vary depending on the size of the boot
media used. If the boot media is a high-endurance one with capacity larger than 142 GB, a VMFS
datastore is created automatically to store virtual machine data.
VMware ESXi Installation and Setup
VMware, Inc. 13