I bought a fanless Intel N5100 + 4 x Intel 225l ethernet ports on AliExpress. ESXi 7.0u3 does not have the driver for this, and you have to create your own ISO instailler with the community driver added, but that’s another story some other time.
Anyhow, I put on small memory (8GB) and small-ish NVME. My original intension was to install pfSense and be done with it. I however decided to install ESXi, and got surprized to see 120GB of disk space is occupied by VMFSL.
Apparently, that’s the ESXi’s system. I sure don’t need that much space for ESXi system. After a few installation attempts later, finally found the answer how to make this partition smaller.
The credit goes to here.
TL;DR
1. ESXi always takes up 120GB. I did not pay attention to this before. All other home ESXi machine’s system disk is gigantic to notice. Sigh.
2. At the very begging of ESXi installer, press “Shift-O” to bring up the boot options.
3.append systemMediaSize=min to it.
4. Hit return and continue the rest of installation.
The valid option values are “min”, “small”, “default”, “max”. I think for my needs, “min” is the only value I care.