Installing ESXi 5.0 on to a USB drive, Dell Power Edge T310

[Dberg201110141]

I would like to know if anybody has tried to install ESXi 5.0 on to a USB drive with Dell T310? Pros and Cons ?

The system is not for production only for testing, I would like to save some cost and only get 2 HDDs for data storage

Thanks!

// Daniel.

[PduPreez · Accepted solution]

Hi

Daniel Berneling wrote:

I would like to know if anybody has tried to install ESXi 5.0 on to a USB drive with Dell T310? Pros and Cons ?

The system is not for production only for testing, I would like to save some cost and only get 2 HDDs for data storage

Thanks!

// Daniel.

Yes it has an internal USB slots (2) and Dell Power Edge T310 is on the HCL just verify your CPU series

People did experience lots off issues installing ESXi4 on the boxes but it is RAID controller driver related.

This should be included and sorted out on ESXi 5: See http://communities.vmware.com/thread/243513?start=15&tstart=0

I am using a HP Microserver with ESXi 5 happily booting from USB

Please award points if the is helpful/correct :smileycool:

Added: You can download the Dell specific ESXi Installable ISO from Dell's site

[Virtualinfra]

Pros:-

is like an embedded version of ESXi

the solution is more flexible

you can have diskless node, without the need of boot from SAN

do not loose any space on the local hard disk and you do not have a silly partitioning that can create problem in future grow of your disk

Cons:-
The solution could be less reliable compared to a RAID solution with hard disk, cause if you have a problem on the flash unit you cannot power-on and power-off correctly the ESXi.

When ESXi is running it works on a ramdisk, so the flash can "fail" without "big" problems.

Some vendor (like Dell and Cisco) will release a special configuration with a dual SD reader to implement a "RAID" configuration also for the flash card.

But there is also a more simple solution: you can clone your flash periodically (for example with the command dd) to another "backup" flash.

Another problem is that flash memory are very sensitive to writes, and have limited amount of writes which can be exhausted really fast.

Refer the below site for more information on this:-

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11349

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[Dberg201110141]

Thanks for all the info.

I will be using the PERC H700A with 512 BBC, I belive ESXi suppports this controller and the CPU is also on the HCL.

I found the http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/eslvmwre/VS_5/index.htm website, I guess this is the one I should use,

VMware vSphere 5 for Dell PowerEdge Servers.

[PduPreez]

Yes that looks like the one !

Please don't forget to award points by simply clicking the tabshelpful/correct :smileycool: