Esxi datastore on M.2 Nvme Drive. Wears out the drive quickly?

[Roveer]

I was doing some research last night about building a small form factor Esxi lab and I came across the following information from this location:

ESXi Hardware Requirements

It said:

ESXi 6.7 Installation on M.2 and other Non-USB Low-end Flash Media

Unlike USB flash devices, the ESXi installer creates a VMFS datastore on M.2 and other non-USB low-end flash media. If you deploy a virtual machine or migrate a virtual machine to this boot device datastore, the boot device can be worn out quickly depending on the endurance of the flash device and the characteristics of the workload. Even read-only workloads can cause problems on low-end flash devices.

Important:If you install ESXi on M.2 or other non-USB low-end flash media, delete the VMFS datastore on the device immediately after installation. See vSphere Storage for more information on removing VMFS datastores.

I was going to put a 500gb or 1tb evo 970 nvme as the boot and storage device. 

Does this mean that I should't do that?

Does this just mean the "boot device"?

How about if I use a small SSD to boot and then use a nvme for storage?  I'm confused about this.  I really want to use a fast nvme but don't want to destroy the device doing so.

Thanks,

Roveer.

[daphnissov]

If you get a high-quality NVMe drive you'll probably be in a better spot, but keep in mind that ESXi is not designed for consumer hardware. Local storage has always been problematic and most of the issues that come up on these forums with regard to problems fall into two main categories: 1) snapshots that were forgotten/unknown and 2) local storage issues. With proper VM backups to external storage and an acknowledgement that your local storage has finite lifespan and you shouldn't be running "production" workloads, you should be ok with a high-quality NVMe drive.