I believe that some people have reported success doing this. I think it'll need to be hooked up to the SATA controller, though - IDE controllers are usually not detected correctly for booting. You should be able to follow the same instructions as you would for USB flash drives for creating the image.

As far as "flash friendly" - as long as you're not hosting VMs on the CF card, then it shouldn't be too bad. It does, however, write log files and configuration changes to the card, so there is some amount of writing, and, unless you purchase a card and/or writer with the technology to flash the card evenly, it could suffer from one part of it being flashed more frequently than the rest.

Each of the VMs have swap files, but you can configure where these are stored. The default is for them to be stored with the virtual machine, so I don't imagine that this will be a problem for the CF card if you're not storing VMs on the card.

Hi,
I run a ESX3.5 full blown version that way for more as a year now and it works really nice. Its more performant as using the normal IDE drive that it had before.
I admit that it was an old drive
There's not much writing going on on the CF card, most of what is being written is the log files and if there's a lot of writing going on there... you probably have other issues to worry about.
But even if it writes a lot down there (I had the FileIO 0xbad0006 issue write down in the log for months... every minute a couple of lines at least) it can deal with that. The "wear rate" is hugely overrated. It is not comparable to cheap USB sticks that actually do show wear and break quickly.


--
Wil

I am running a Dell PE400c using the built-in ICH5 SATA controller and a 4GB CF card in a CF->SATA adapter. Bascailly, as long as your SATA controller is recognized, then the CF card in the SATA adapter looks like any other basic SATA drive. Just don't store VMs to the flash memory or anything else that writes much to the drive. Use the CF just to boot ESX and have a separate datastore for the VMs.