Here is a breakdown of the actual installation time for a single server:įormat USB/SD storage media – Extract ISO In fact, I recently had to install ESXi on a rack of 24-servers and I when I informed the customer that the installation of ESXi alone would take approximately 8-hours – they responded “I thought it only took 5-minutes to install ESXi?” Although the installation of ESXi is extremely fast, 5-minutes per server is really stretching the truth. VMware vSAN 7.If you ask most VMware Administrators how long it takes to install vSphere ESXi 6 the most common response is, “About 5-minutes”.ESXi 7.0 U2a Potentially Killing USB and SD drives! - 18 May, 2021.ESXi 7.0 SD Card/USB Drive Issue Temporary Workaround - 1 Jun, 2021.ESXi stuck in Not responding from vCenter - 24 Aug, 2021 Hot Add NVMe Device Caused PSOD on ESXi - 8 Sep, 2021.
I am sure further guidance will also be given before the 7.0u3 update is released as well, especially now that the original KB has been pulled. Anyone who is still running production vSphere hosts on SD-Card/USB thumb drives needs to take action as soon as possible to ensure support going forward. I think removing support for a boot option in a update release and not a major release is a bit strange. Seems that part was premature, since the KB has since been pulled from the public. Publishing the new KB article before ESXi 7.0u3 is released is also good. I do applaud VMware for being transparent about this. Just like with everything else, plan accordingly.
One alternative is using booting the hosts from a resilient external USB drive (HDD/SSD/NVMe) in an enclosure, since using a USB device isn’t the real problem, but rather that the resiliency of the NAND chips on a SD-card or USB thumb drive isn’t suited for the storage scheme and layout introduced in ESXi 7.0.Īnother possibility is using USB storage for vSAN, or even using something like an rPI as an iSCSI target, either way you’ll need something outside of the vSAN cluster hosts themselves to ensure ESXi keeps running. Many small form factor setups only allow two internal devices, typically one M.2 and one SATA3 device, and since vSAN requires a minimum of one cache drive and one capacity drive per disk group, this might be a problem for many small setups. While small form factor nodes, like the Intel NUC, is inherently unsupported from VMware anyway, the new requirement of having a location to place the ESXi OS Data might be a problem. While I completely support and understand why VMware is doing this, and I would never recommend anyone running their production vSphere environments on hosts booting from SD-Card/USB boot devices, this might be an issue for homelab setups, especially those running vSAN. I have a suspicion that is 7.x specific, and that will change in a future version, and that ESXi might not even install on SD-Cards and USB thumb drives at some point. They also list the workarounds for this as either install to a non SD/USB device, or to add a persistent storage device.Īdditional information can also be found in Boot device guidance for low endurance media(vSphere and vSAN) (82515), which somewhat contradictory states that upgrades will still be supported in 7.x.įor all upgrades ESXi 7.0 onwards, we continue to support existing boot devices. A system with only a SD-Card/USB boot device is operating in an unsupported state with the potential for premature corruption. This article outlines that from the next major version, after 7.x, using standalone SD card/USB will be unsupported, with the following notice: “ VMware strongly advises that you move away completely from using SD card/USB as a boot device option on any future server hardware.”ĮSXi requires local persistent storage for operating system use, to store system state, configuration, logs, and live data. September 2021: A new KB article has been published: Removal of SD card/USB as a standalone boot device option (85685).