esxi on flash, persistent scratch location?

[trink408]

For those of you running esxi on flash memory, are you going in and configuring a persistent scratch location?

Is that a "must do" step if running on flash?

Thanks in advance

Kevin

[sparrowangelste]

if you dont configure one the host will use ram to store logs.

its not a must do but a nice to have.

you will loose your logs if you crash. you could setup a syslog collector though

[mcowger · Accepted solution]

Given thgat without it you will lose logs during reboots and will have no good place for VUM to put its files, I consider it a must.

[trink408]

Thanks guys.

So is a vmfs datastore located on iscsi storage an okay place to locate the scratch partition?

I have no direct attached storage on these hosts...

How large should the scratch partition be sized?

[mcowger]

Its a great place.  Put it on cheap SATA / NL-SAS drives too

I generally size to somewhere in the 5-10GB range to give plenty of room for logs and patches.

[trink408]

Thanks.

Is it okay if the vmfs datastore I use is shared amongst all the esxi hosts, just create a unique directory for each hosts scratch?

[mcowger]

yup/

[LuigiC]

Yep

scratch4hosta, scratch4hostb, scratch4hostc ...scratch4hostz

I will add that scratch is a great idea, using RAM for logs is a waste of memory amount other things.