Boot ESXi from USB, what if you then remove the USB drive?

[Skeme]

Hi,

Someone in our IT team wants to use ESXi 5 bootable, i.e. booting an ESXi host from a 2GB USB flash drive in order to save the cost of buying local hard drives to put into a RAID set.

I know there are some downsides to doing this, but one thing I wanted to know specifically is what happens to ESXi if you remove the USB drive, or the USB drive fails, whilst the host is running. Will the host continue to run, since it will have loaded the ESXi image into memory? Or will it fail if it can't see the USB drive that it booted from?

Thanks!

[continuum · Accepted solution]

ESXi will run on - running VMs are not affected.

Usually it should be no problem to plug it in again - but I have seen cases where the system will not boot after a rude unplug - so avoid it.

[Skeme]

Thank you so much for that prompt and helpful answer - full points awarded.

[continuum]

I dont care for points and I dont think it was a helpful answer.

If I were you I would occasionally run a script to backup your config so that you can recover from a boot failure faster

[Wahnsinicka]

hi I'm testing actual the same situation.

i have 2 ESX 5 Hosts.

while running a VM on Host A i remove the USB Stick.

now i'm still able to migrate the running VM from A to B.

But it's not possible to switch back the VM (from B to A again)

i even do not get a warning in Virtual Center if i remove the USB Stick.

I see only warnings in vmkernel.

anyone ever  thougt about a monitoring for the USB stick i bootet from?

Robert