VMware Cloud Community
hamahama
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-23-2023 07:25 PM

Continued use of an SD card as a boot device on ESXi 7.0.3

We are running ESXi 6.7 update 3 on HPE Proliant DL360 Gen 10 machine.
Since 6.7 will soon be deprecated, we are currently planning to upgrade all of our 20 some hosts to 7.0 update 3.

However, we came across the VMWare advisory (https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85685) warning users about the use of an SD card as a standalone boot device, which, unfortunately is exactly our setup here.

Our server is using a USB device (with a 32-GB SD card in it) and has no internal storage (it's connected to HPE Primera as an external storage device).
We understand that VMWare continues to support the use of such a device to store the boot partition, but aside from the upgrade itself to 7.0.3, is there anything specific that we should do before/during /after the upgrade operation to mitigate the impact of increased i/o on the boot device?

Many thanks for your support

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2 Replies
mannharry
Hot Shot
Hot Shot
‎03-24-2023 11:47 AM

Since for vsphere 7.x boot device (SD cards) are supported, probably once upgraded you can plan of changing the boot device from sd card to scsi lun .

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hamahama
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-26-2023 11:19 PM

I read a few KB articles that told me about relocating /scratch partition out of the boot device (SD Card) to RAM Disk for instance.

But I'm worried about the size it will occupy inside the physical memory. Do you know how much space /scratch will fill up?

Would it impact the stability of VMs running on the host?

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