ESXI 8 boot from USB what is good practice?

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jx3000

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  • #1
    I recently installed esxi 8 on usb and saw what I have attached as an image.

    I have always installed to USB and then placed the swap file with the VM.

    What is considered best practise or the way to do it today? What is OSData, does it update that often that I should be worried about the USB disk?
     

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    lurch1989

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  • #5
    DrWebster said:
    Best practice now is pretty much to have a fixed volume to install ESXi to -- removable media like USB flash drives and SD cards are discouraged. A small SSD (preferably RAID 1 of SSDs) is a good idea.
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    This, I've had too many USB drives die on me to consider this in a production environment.

    If you're using a SAN then just get two small SSDs in RAID1 for the ESXi install and sleep easy at night.

    If you're using DAS then just do the same and create a separate data volume with additional disks
     
    Paladin

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  • #9
    I've done that on Cisco UCS without issue though it is a pain to setup the first couple times and when you have a big outage, it is one more crappy thing to worry about. Personally, I loved the USB boot drive option and wish they would have kept it since drives are cheaper, faster and more reliable than ever (as long as you get decent ones). The samsung and san disk ones even have hardware wear leveling built in. Alternately, I wish a lot more enterprise hardware from the last 5-10 years had m.2 drives. Dell really dragged their feet on that one. That would have made the transition a lot easier if I could just pop in a 128GB m.2 drive and be done.
     
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    DrWebster

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  • #11
    I too liked the boot-from-SD/USB option since it was cheaper and, arguably, easier. Provided you configured everything correctly it was plenty reliable too -- problem is, not many people did so, and that's probably why the deprecated the option. If you don't move the ESXi logging to a different volume, it'll wear out the SD/USB from writes. If you do move the logging, though, the only time the SD/USB gets written to is during software updates, and during boot ESXi will read everything it needs OS-wise into RAM, so the media hardly gets touched. (I once had a USB DOM die in a host, and the host kept chugging along, albeit with a warning that its boot volume had failed.)
     
    Paladin

    Paladin

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  • #12
    sryan2k1 said:
    BOSS has been around since at least 2018
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    Yeah that actually kind of underscores my complaint. They didn't bother to integrate m.2 on the mainboard (or at least they didn't hurry to do it), they just made an option card that takes up a slot you could/might need to use for something else. :/ It's a decent solution but not a great solution when they could have put m.2 slots on the mainboard for a lot of systems without much effort. I think they got caught with their pants down a bit and scrambled. It does have some upsides as well but it's not my favorite.
     
    Brandon Kahler

    Brandon Kahler

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  • #13
    Boot from storage array, at least direct attached SAS, has been successful for me at a number of sites. Carve up some 64GB LUNs, map then as LUN0 to each host, the HBA see LUN0 as the default boot option, and away you go. Otherwise, yeah, BOSS cards.

    Edit: In fact, today I'm replacing dual-SD modules for BOSS cards in two hosts and upgrading ESXi versions.
     
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    oikjn

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  • #17
    remote boot for exsi OS just gives me pause. Sure, in theory the SAN should be reliable and if you don't have the SAN, you don't have VMs anyway, but when $h1t goes down, the last thing I want to care about is trying to figure out if the problem is the SAN or the host itself or a network issue. two cheap raid1 ssd/nvme drives somewhere are just too cheap and easy to not do IMO. I'd sooner run a single SSD and just deal with the host failure if it ever happened since your setup should have at least N+1 redundancy for hosts anyway.
     
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    sryan2k1

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  • #18
    I'm unsure of the current flock, but the last few batches of Dell server's we've ordered if you got them with 0 front panel drives they wouldn't install a RAID controller or backplane so you couldn't put disks in (at least without adding those after the fact), so we always order ours with a single SSD of the smallest capacity.

    It's saved us a few times where we've had a need to add some DAS in a server that wasn't planned for it.
     
    continuum

    continuum

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  • #19
    sryan2k1 said:
    , but the last few batches of Dell server's we've ordered if you got them with 0 front panel drives they wouldn't install a RAID controller or backplane so you couldn't put disks in (at least without adding those after the fact), so we always order ours with a single SSD of the smallest capacity.
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    That is correct-- Dell won't ship a backplane without at least one drive installed.

    (again, at least as of current experience. If it was different in the past then I could not speak to that)
     
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    DrWebster

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  • #21
    moosemaimer said:
    The configurator on the website literally won't let you order a machine with no drives, if you try to deselect everything it always defaults to 1 drive.
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    Nobody should be buying servers direct from Dell's website. Even a rep that's asleep at the wheel can get you a discount, and configure the server however you want.
     
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