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trink408
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Local disc or USB flash drive?

Looking at building a couple new hosts running esxi5, and I'm wondering what the best option is, install esxi on local disc on the host, or run it from flash memory?

What's everyone doing, pros/cons of one over the other?

Thanks in advance

Kevin

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Bahou
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Kevin,

It sounds like you would be fine booting from USB if you want to save yourself the cash of having to buy the hard drives.  You will probably want to redirect your host logs to a syslog server for long term storage.  Whether they boot from local disk or USB flash will make no difference when it comes to performance and running in a cluster.

- Jack

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Bahou
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Hey Kevin,

What are you trying to accomplish?  Is this just going to be a test lab?  Will you have shared storage to utilize between the two hosts?  If this is an addition to a production environment for testing before an upgrade?  Performance wise I can't think of any reason you would use one over the other.  USB flash boot is really more for when you have no local disk option.  If you were deploying 6 or more hosts I would say look at configuring an AutoDeploy server.

- Jack
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trink408
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Jack,

This is not a test lab, just adding a few more hosts, and I'm not sure if it's worth buying hosts with local storage, or just running esxi off a usb drive.

I do have shared storage between the hosts, they will be put into an HA cluster.

Thanks

Kevin

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Bahou
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Kevin,

It sounds like you would be fine booting from USB if you want to save yourself the cash of having to buy the hard drives.  You will probably want to redirect your host logs to a syslog server for long term storage.  Whether they boot from local disk or USB flash will make no difference when it comes to performance and running in a cluster.

- Jack
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trink408
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Thanks for the insight. 

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EdWilts
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We install to USB sticks or SD cards whenever we can and have about 140 hosts configured this way.  It isolates the ESXi install from the rest of the data.  The HP-certified media isn't cheap but they fail less often than hard drives.

.../Ed (VCP4, VCP5)