Red Hat NETSCAPE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 4.5 User Manual download pdf (Page 199)

Disks

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File System Management on SCSI Disks

and RAID

The VMFS file system is a simple, high-performance file system on physical SCSI disks

and partitions, used for storing large files such as the disk images for ESX Server virtual

machines and, optionally, the memory images of suspended virtual machines. A

server’s VMFS file systems are mounted automatically by the console operating

system and appear in the /vmfs directory.

Files in these mounted VMFS file systems can be viewed and manipulated with

ordinary file commands such as ls and cp. As noted later in this section, there are

limitations when you use some standard disk utilities with files in a VMFS file system

— limitations caused by the fact that the utilities often assume a file is no larger than

2GB. The vmkfstools program provides additional functions that are particularly

useful when you need to create files of a particular size and when you need to import

files from and export files to the console operating system’s file system. In addition,

vmkfstools is designed to work with large files, overcoming the 2GB limit of some

standard file utilities.

Using vmkfstools

To create and manipulate files on SCSI disks managed by VMware ESX Server, use

vmkfstools. It supports the creation of a VMware ESX Server file system (VMFS) on

a SCSI disk or partition and the management of files stored in the VMFS. It is useful for

storing multiple virtual disk images on a single SCSI disk or partition of a SCSI disk.

The format for the command is

vmkfstools <options> <device>[:<file>]

The vmkfstools command is issued with a device specification and one or more

options.

<device> specifies a SCSI device (a SCSI disk or a partition on a SCSI disk) being

manipulated and <options> specifies the operation to be performed.

<device> is specified in a form such as:

vmhba1:2:0:3

Here, vmhba1 specifies the second SCSI adapter activated by the command

vmkload_mod .../XXX.o vmhba. (See VMkernel Module Loader on page 174

for details on vmkload_mod. ) The second number specifies the target on the

adapter, the third number specifies the LUN (logical unit number) and the fourth

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Red Hat NETSCAPE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 4.5 User Manual Page 199