I have a number of ESXI hosts connected to my Jenkins server, and each host has a ton of RAM. In my Jenkins builds, I want to deploy and test VM images as fast as possible, so I'd like to know if it is possible to create the VM's disk images in a RAM-based datastore? I have no need for any disk persistence, because as soon as the Jenkins build has completed, the VM will be torn down.
I'm pretty sure this isn't possible. The "closest" you could get is create a virtual nas is create a ramdisk and use that to provision a iscsi lun.
This wouldn't be possible with ESXi, but you could run your test/deploy pipeline using Docker or vSphere Integrated Containers.