Scratch Space Solutions

[barnette08]

Hey all, it's been a while - hope all is well!  I'm looking for some insight on a scratch space solution.  I have blades with 64GB mirrored SDs and using them to boot locally.  I have storage arrays at my disposal, but I'd prefer to keep it local, since the SDs are mirrored and they are so big.

Since 6.5 doesn't show the local OS as a datastore - any directory I create there doesn't persist of course.

Thoughts?

[Nick_Andreev]

Scratch partition is created automatically when you install ESXi. Why do you need to configure it manually?

[Rubeck]

These are two examples where scratch space may not be automatically defined on persistent storage. In each case, the temporary scratch location is configured on a ramdisk:

• ESXi deployed on a Flash or SD device, including a USB key. Scratch partitions are not created on Flash or SD storage devices even if connected during install, due to the potentially limited read/write cycles available.

See Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 4.x/5.x/6.x (1033696) | VMware KB

/Rubeck

[barnette08]

Yea...I know how to do it, I guess I was just more probing to see what others in this situation are doing.  creating a dedicated datastore and adding directories for each host? Using separate data stores for each host? Etc, etc.

[hendersp3]

I have been in this spot before with UCS blades booting from SD cards.  I ended up creating a single datastore on FC storage with a folder for each ESX host.  I scripted the folder creation and used host profiles to ensure the scratch was configured on new provisioned hosts. 

[barnette08]

That's the approach we ended up taking as well.  Would you be willing to the script?  I don't use host profiles but I should be able to work around that within the script.