Diskless ESXi Servers - Booting from USB/SD

#Chri5#

#Chri5#

#Chri5#

Soldato
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I've been reading a few blogs / websites about this and thought I'd ask the OCuk Server Massive on their thoughts about this. For instance, Techhead. The all-conquering ML110 G5 in my lab has been happily running ESXi from a USB stick for a year now

As pointed out in the comments on that blog, you don't get the protection of, say, a RAID1 mirror. However, you do save in server cost, power and cooling.

Discuss :D
 
Isn't it pretty much standard practice to boot off flash for these sort of applications? I've been doing it for years.
 
For a low footprint hypervisor like ESXi it is fairly common to run it off a flash card. Infact a fair few modern servers come with the option of an intergrated card for this exact purpose.

I dont really have an opinion myself, my general school of thought is that if a big company like Dell are offering it as an option it must be fairly popular.
 
Indeed, HP started shipping servers with an internal USB port and were reportedly including a stick with ESXi on it right from the factory

While since i've had any hands on purchasing of servers though, these days I have submit an infrastructure demand and wait for it to magically appear in the datacenter, bit boring if you ask me
 
I wouldnt say it's standard practice to install them that way, but 2 points:

- If you're running diskless servers, I'm assuming you have a SAN. ESX supports booting from a SAN
- Most people with diskless servers will be running the proper vSphere suite, so HA or even FT will negate the risk of a disk failure
 
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