New to ESXi, Best practice for the ESXi operating installation USB or Local Drives?

[Curcloin2]

I'm new to Vmware and run a small shop, Whats the best practice or ideal method of installing the ESXi OS.  I currently have some that I installed on the embedded usb stick on the server.  After doing some research would it be better to have two small SSD drives that I can raid with the Operating system, then anothe RAID for the VM Datastore.  The USB is a single source of failure.

Thanks,

Mike

[mortsaid]

It is recommaded always through Local Drives only.

[RyanH84 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Having internal drives in RAID1 for the O/S is definitely going to avoid a single point of failure as you correctly pointed out. At present if your USB stick dies, your host will run into problems quite quickly and you'll have to get a new one and re-install again. You could back up your host configuration though and realistically - it doesn't take too much time to rebuild a host if it does die. Losing other stuff like networking configurations and such would be a pain though!

I think having two internal SSD drives in RAID1 for the O/S is probably overkill. You'll get some benefit from boot speed but realistically most servers don't reboot all that often and once ESXi is up and running there is very little activity on the disks, some config updates every so often and so on. I'd be inclined to use an SSD to create a Host Cache drive for swap, that way you can actually utilize the SSD and get more performance for your money.

Many manufacturers (such as Dell) use internal SD cards in RAID1. Whilst SD cards aren't known for being terribly robust, because of the small footprint of ESXi and the minimal number of writes needed once initially installed, it makes them a cheaper alternative to enterprise class disks for the O/S.

As for your Datastores, having an internal RAID of your local disks is best if you are running a standalone host with no network attached storage. You still have the problem of host failure though.

Cheers,

Ryan

[Curcloin2]

Thanks Ryan,

We are going to be using HP servers, I'll double check and make sure they have the raid embedded SD or there specific design.  For now its going to be a standalone host RAID 5 the best then?

Best,

Mike

[RyanH84]

Hi,

What RAID is a bit of a broad question as there are a number of factors that determine your storage requirements. Generally speaking, in terms of capacity .vs. performance .vs. resilience , RAID5 is kind of your middle territory.

How many servers are you looking at getting and is there any intention for any network storage?

Ryan