I rarely run into this issue because most deployments overprovision the amount of storage for an rXg deployment. That said, sometimes, you may want to try and squeeze as much into a host as possible. Therefore, I am writing this article to assist with the exact rXg storage requirements.

There are (3) numbers we need to be aware of when calculating how much storage will be made available to an rXg VM in ESXI.

This is important because both rXg and ESXI, by default, will reserve swap space equal to the number of GBs of memory you have provisioned, altering the amount of available storage for the rXg. For example, let’s say that you build a VM like this:

6 CPU Cores, 9 GB Ram, 34 GB Storage

You will not have 34 GB of available storage after installing the rXg.

rXg will reserve 9 GB of space from the 34, leaving you with 25 GB.

ESXI will add 9 GB of required space to the 34 you provisioned. Now, that VM will consume 43 GB of space on the host instead of 34.

In the VM configuration on ESXI, there is an option to reserve the memory:

If this box is checked, ESXI will not reserve any additional memory for swap space.

6 CPU Cores, 9 GB Ram, 34 GB Storage

You will not have 34 GB of available storage after installing the rXg.

rXg will still reserve 9 GB of space from the 34, leaving you with 25 GB.

ESXI will add 9 GB of required space to the 34 you provisioned. Now, that VM will consume 43 GB of space on the host instead of 34.

ESXI will only reserve the desired 34 GB of storage.

To meet the minimum specifications for this example:

We need to build a VM to the following specifications and reserve the memory:

6 CPU Cores, 9 GB Ram, 44 GB Storage

44 GB of storage, less 9 GB for swap space, less 1 GB for rounding = 34 GB of available storage for rXg.