Is anyone here running ESXi 7 U3 on SD Cards? I'm just trying to get clarification on whether or not ESXi on SD Cards is supported with vSphere 7. I did read a kb article (excerpt below) that they will not be supported on the next major release (8.0 ?), but will be on 7.x. But I am also seeing it mentioned that ESXi 7 is causing SD cards to fail due to write intensity. We have about 70 VMware hosts running 6.7 U3 and were about to upgrade to vSphere 7 U3. Out of those 70 hosts, roughly 90% of them are using SD cards for the OS (ESXi). The SD cards are 32GB. There was a delay for us to upgrade previously due to needing to replace other hardware, which we did. Now we just became aware of the SD Card issue, which will mean having to procure new storage for over 60 hosts and perform fresh installs of ESXi 7 U3 which will take much longer than just performing an upgrade, which is what we had planned to do.
Before going through the process of procuring new hardware yet again, just wanted to check if there is a possible work around, for our current configuration using SD Cards for the ESXi OS, to work with ESXi 7 U3?
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https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85685
"Options for 7.x
It is strongly recommended that customers start planning to move away completely from SD card usage by following the options listed above for future releases.
However, it is important to note that we are providing exceptions on SD card usage with 7.x and will continue to provide support.
SD cards, even though not an ideal option, can still be used as a standalone boot option to store all partitions including OSDATA, through all vSphere 7.x releases.
Customers on previous versions (for example, 6.x) of vSphere should feel confident to move to 7.0U2c as several critical issues have been fixed with this release, and some workarounds have been provided as default mainly for the VMTools & Scratch areas.
Note that RAMDisk as storage for OSDATA is also an option that is supported through 7.x releases but will be removed in future releases"
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2021/09/esxi-7-boot-media-consideration-vmware-technical-guidance.h...
https://4sysops.com/archives/new-features-in-vmware-vsphere-7-update-3/
“Phasing out SD cards for ESXi installations—Since SD cards are less reliable than flash devices, VMware is making a move to SSD, making it harder to install new versions of ESXi to SD cards. SD cards have lower endurance and reliability, and they have more issues over time compared to flash.
As you know, flash devices have garbage collectors that allow deactivating dead bits on the device. They also come with additional unused capacity that is freed as the device accumulates writes over time. Thus, if capacity becomes unavailable due to failures, the overall capacity remains the same until the spare capacity is used up.
This and other reliability features built into flash devices mean VMware can start deprecating SD cards as boot media. Starting with U3, you'll see a warning message that the device is in degraded mode, which means that VMware ESXi limits the writes to the device.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/nqhk5t/any_eta_date_on_esxi_70u3/
“We have had SD card failures in dozens of our datacenter VM Hosts, ever since upgrading to 7.0 U2. It has been a complete mess. We have resorted to installing the ESXi OS onto the local disks, until the update has been released. I simply cannot believe VMware made such a massive change to the fundamental OS storage, without giving everyone more of a heads up. It's just ludicrous.”
https://www.mirazon.com/vsphere-7-breaks-sd-card-boot-storage/
“If you’re on VMware vSphere 7 and you can’t figure out why your SD cards keep dying, or if you’re about to upgrade to vSphere 7 and you use SD cards as your boot storage, this is for you. Basically, VMware reconfigured how vSphere interacts with the storage partitions on the boot device and SD cards are just not going to be able to handle the write intensity anymore, so you’ll need to change that out for another form of storage. Other flash boot devices like SSDs or BOSS cards are NOT affected as much by this behavior.”
