I'm very, very new to ESXi, so forgive me if this is a simple question, but I'm a bit stuck trying to decide the best way to configure my storage. I'm using a cheap HP tower server, which is going to do nothing more complicated than file sharing. It has a hardware RAID controller and local SATA disks which is presenting itself to ESXi as one 2TB volume. That's fine, however the VMs will only need a tiny amount of storage, less than 20GB most probably and I want to use the rest of the space available for the file server's storage.
My question is, what's the best way to do that? By default, ESXi is only allowing me to connect a 256GB virtual disk to a VM. I know I can re-format the datastore to allow bigger virtual disks, but my knowledge ends about there. Is there a way I could partition the array and present the partition as a 'raw drive' to one of the VMs and use the smaller partition to store my VMs on? I know there's an option to present a raw disk when adding a new virtual disk, but this is always greyed out. I have a feeling this has something to do with paths, but that's beyond me for the moment.
If somebody could suggest a best practise for this scenario and point me in the right direction to do my research, it would be really appreciated.
