My VMWare Lab that I run hosts several guest servers.  The main storage for guest operating systems is on RAID consisting of 6 SAS 300GB drives.  For mass storage, there are 2x 4TB SATA drives.  Since VMWare does not support “Software RAID” these 2x SATA drives are just installed as normal drives and I set them up as individual data stores.  Hence there is no redundancy.  One of those drives started to show signs of failure so I went to replace it.  While trying to unmount the drive VMWare kept saying the datastore was in use, even though I had migrated all VMDKs off to the other data store.

Then I found that the scratch partition was on this datastore that I as trying to umount…this is the point of this lab, for me to learn this stuff.

I followed these steps below to move the scratch partition to one of the other datastores.

Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 4.x/5.x/6.x (1033696)

Configuring a persistent scratch location using the VMware Host Client for ESXi 6.5

1. Connect to ESXi host using Host Client.
2. Click Storage.
3. Right-click a datastore and click Browse.
4. Create a uniquely-named directory for this ESXi host.For example:

   .locker-ESXHostname

5. Close the Datastore Browser.
6. Click the Manage tab
7. Under System, click Advanced System Settings.The setting ScratchConfig.CurrentScratchLocation shows the current location of the scratch partition.
8. In the ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation field, enter a directory path that is unique for this host.For example,  /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreUUID/.locker-ESXHostname.
9. Reboot the host.

Posted from Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States.