USB3.0 Pendrive as vSphere Hypervisor Boot device

[CarlosMaia]

Hello all!

I have a Xeon Scalable server based on a Supermicro X11SPL-F board with USB type-A 3.0 header on board.

I was thinking of installing ESXi on a 16GB USB3.0 pen. Is the pen read/write speed relevant? Or any will do?

Regards,

cmmaia

[5mall5nail5]

Avoid a totally cheap one as you do want it to last.  The read/write speed does not matter at all because you should be using it only for boot.  Remember after setting up ESXi and booting, set the syslog to a persistent datastore otherwise you risk ruining the USB key and the system not booting in the future.

[CarlosMaia]

I was thinking about buying a branded pendrive, either Sandisk or Kingston. Do I need anything special from their product lines regarding reliablility and speed?

[daphnissov]

You may just want to test with a loaner USB 3.0 drive before you commit to that path. ESXi doesn't like certain USB 3.0 controllers and so you may not be able to install it. Most USB 2.0 drives seem to work in my tests, however.

[CarlosMaia]

OK. So, if we forget USB boot, what would one recomend? I have a 250GB 960 Evo NVMe M.2 and could also boot out of a SATA SSD, SATADOM or SATA HDD. Would it be beneficial to go to these options? I think they're a waste of money as ESXi doesn't seem to require a special boot drive. What's wrong with USB boot support? It looks the perfect solution to me in order not to waste huge amounts of money on over-the-top boot drives.

[daphnissov]

I wouldn't rule out USB boot as that works perfectly fine. I'm just suggesting you try a sample USB 2.0 and 3.0 device because sometimes (or maybe all the time, not sure) ESXi does not recognize or like USB 3.0 controllers and devices. Ultimately it doesn't matter from a performance perspective because ESXi isn't read or write intensive. It really comes down to what will work and what won't.

[jasnyder · Accepted solution]

Some boards support turning USB 3.0 off and/or have a mix of 2.0 and 3.0 ports.  I personally use the cheapo SanDisk Cruzer 16gb - Amazon.com: SanDisk Cruzer Fit CZ33 16GB USB 2.0 Low-Profile Flash Drive- SDCZ33-016G-B35: Electroni... (currently about $6 USD).  I use it in a lab, and I have a mix of white box Gigabyte boards and old Dell R720s.  The oldest ones have been booting off these thumb drives for 4 years and I haven't had a failure yet.  Again that's a lab environment, I wouldn't necessarily recommend for production, but then again, why not?  If you have enough servers that you can lose one or two without issue, these thumb drives are cheap enough that you can have one or two (hundred) sitting around as backup.  I didn't see a reason to waste perfectly good SATA slots or expensive storage on the ESXi boot device.  Just my perspective.  Also, I've seen zero performance issues with them.