The storage screen and the LVM default, graded honestly
Of all the screens in the Ubuntu Server installer, storage is the only one whose choices are genuinely awkward to undo. It is also the screen where the default - an LVM group - is widely accepted without being understood. This page explains what guided storage builds, grades the LVM default and the encryption option honestly, and flags the volume-sizing surprise that catches people after their first login.
The storage screen offers Use an entire disk, and on a fresh virtual disk that is the honest right answer. The installer partitions the virtual disk for you: a small EFI partition the firmware boots from, a /boot partition, and the rest of the disk handed to the main system volume. There is no benefit in hand-carving a brand new VM disk into exotic slices - every experienced admin uses guided here and spends their attention elsewhere.
What deserves your attention is the checkbox under it: Set up this disk as an LVM group, ticked by default. That one tick shapes how your storage behaves for the life of the machine.
LVM (Logical Volume Manager) puts a flexible layer between the physical disk and your filesystems. Instead of fixed partitions, the disk becomes a pool - a volume group - and your system lives in a logical volume carved out of that pool. The practical payoff comes later: when the disk fills up, you can grow the virtual disk in ESXi, extend the pool, and grow the system volume live, without reinstalling or repartitioning. Without LVM that same job is fiddly and risky.
The cost is one extra layer of concepts to understand when something goes wrong. For a server - especially a virtual one, where growing disks is a two-click event - the flexibility wins. Leave the LVM box ticked.
The storage screen also offers to encrypt the LVM group with LUKS. On a laptop that travels, encryption is close to mandatory. On a server in a rack or a VM on your own host, think before ticking: an encrypted system asks for its passphrase at every boot, typed at the console. Every reboot - including the unattended 3 a.m. one after a power cut - waits for a human with console access.
Encryption protects against someone stealing the disk or the VM files. If that is a real threat in your situation, tick it and accept the boot-time cost. If it is not, most small servers run unencrypted, and that is a defensible, common choice - not carelessness.
After Done, the installer shows the full storage configuration review: every partition and volume it is about to create, with sizes and mount points. This is your last free look. Confirm the disk listed is your new virtual disk and the sizes roughly match what you created in ESXi.
Pressing Continue on the confirmation that follows is the point of no return - the installer starts writing. Inside a VM that is safe, because the disk is virtual and empty, but the habit of reading this screen will save you one day on real hardware.
Here is the honest quirk nobody warns you about. On several Ubuntu Server releases, the installer created the root logical volume smaller than the volume group holding it - people gave their VM a 100 GB disk, installed happily, then found df -h showing far less space for the system. Nothing was lost and nothing was broken: the spare space was sitting unallocated in the volume group.
Check once after your first login. If the volume group has free space the root volume is not using, claim it with two commands:
That is LVM quietly proving its worth - a layout fix done live, in seconds, with no reboot. Recent releases size the volume more generously, so on a new LTS install you may find nothing to fix. Either way, thirty seconds of checking replaces a nasty surprise six months from now, mid-incident, on a full disk.
The complete installation on a live ESXi host - creating the virtual machine and working through the installer screens exactly as they appear.
Watch Full VideoYes, for almost every virtual machine. LVM lets you grow the system volume live when you enlarge the virtual disk later, which is the single most common storage job on a server VM. The guided layout with LVM is Ubuntu's own default for good reason.
On several releases the installer created the root logical volume smaller than its volume group, leaving the rest unallocated. Run sudo vgdisplay and look for Free PE/Size. If space is free, extend the root volume with sudo lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv and then sudo resize2fs on the same device. No data is touched.
Only if theft of the disk or VM files is a realistic threat for you. Encryption means a passphrase must be typed at the console on every boot, which breaks unattended restarts. Many small servers on controlled hosts run unencrypted deliberately; a travelling laptop is the opposite case.