While I understand your reasoning, creating small partitions “just because” is not good practice. A better solution is delete the directory and replace it with a link to the real location or if it is going to actually be used give it some real storage space or use it as a mount point. Few things are more frustrating than little stub partitions cluttering up your file system.

While I understand your reasoning, creating small partitions “just because” is not good practice. A better solution is delete the directory and replace it with a link to the real location or if it is going to actually be used give it some real storage space or use it as a mount point. Few things are more frustrating than little stub partitions cluttering up your file system.

Too many people simply click 'next' without changing partitioning, they expect the defaults to be perfect, or at least, for non-perfect defaults to be cleanly reconfigurable after installation.

And by the time they've got someone who knows the ins and outs of ESX looking at their machine (because, perhaps disk space ran out on one of those ESX local mounts),
the system's already deployed, and can't be re-partitioned easily.

How badly are they shooting themselves in the foot? hm..

Fact is that ESXi doesn't let you choose, modify, or even view the partitions unless you enter the unsupported tech support mode. See Jason Boche's post on this for more details http://www.boche.net/blog/?p=120