HPE Dual microSD Flash USB-Stick

[43A8V]

Is VMware supporting the HPE Dual microSD flash USB stick?

This is a software RAID controller variant, and VMware does not support Software Raid. is that so?

I would like to know if I can install Esxi on it?

[ThompsG]

Hi 43A8V,

Yes - VMware is supported on HPE Dual-microSD USB device. We stopped using these due to the latency spikes that kept getting generated every minute or so

Its interesting that HPE list this device as mirrored RAID-1 because it doesn't seem to behave like a traditional RAID device, i.e. having a primary device, etc. These documents talks about installing HPE as long as the server supports ESXi:

• https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=c04630357
• https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04123175.pdf

Kind regards.

[HendersonD]

What are you using to boot your HPE server now?

[ThompsG]

Hi there,

We switched to the internal SD Card slot. No more latency spikes and seems to do the job - the dual MicroSD seemed to be a good idea (and it probably is) but the dependency on the USB slot seemed to remove the advantage you were meant to be gaining.

I haven’t searched extensively but a server will external facing SD card slots that are mirrored seems to be a great idea but not something HPE does.

Kind regards. 

[43A8V]

I have not bought the server yet, I have either for Lenovo server with m.2 enablement kit technology, or for HPE with HPE dual microSD flash USB stick. According to my research, the first variant is more stable and secure, but the second is cheaper.

[HendersonD]

One thing to watch out for if you use Nimble Storage. If you attempt to install Nimble Connection Manager (NCM) for VMWare on an HPE server that boots from an 8GB USB drive, it will lose connection to storage. This is a known bug in NCM that should be fixed in version 6.1 but will not be released for months