esxi resilience question

[mattg1]

Hi all,

I am about to install esxi on a home server (HP Microserver) and I have 4 drives which I will set up as an array.

I want to provide resilience in case the drive which has ESXI installed on fails, can anyone reccommend the best way to do this please?

Also if I installed ESXi on a USB stick, if the stick died how could I recover?

Thank you!

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - Like any server for resilience you will want to configure your drives in some form of RAID array - at minimum RAID1 or RAID5 - both of these RAID configurations will tolerate a single disk failure.

To recover if the USB stick fails you will need to reinstall the ESXi on a different stick -

[mattg1]

would my VMs be safe eventhough ESXI has to be reinstalled? sorry if this is has an obviously answer!

thanks

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

I wouldn't actually worry too much about the Hypervisor (ESXi) itself. If you install it on an USB device (assuming you use a reliable one) you shouldn't have any issues, because once loaded, ESXi runs completely in memory and only writes to the USB device once in a while (e.g. configuration changes, ...). If the USB device dies, you could simply use a new one, re-install ESXi (with preserving the VMFS datastores on the disks) and re-register the existing VMs.

If you don't want to reconfigure the host (i.e. networking, ...) after re-installing it, you could backup the configuration from time to time to be able to restore it once necessary (see e.g. http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-55-command...)

André

[mattg1]

excellent thank you. just backing up my stuff now.

what file format should my USB be formatted as, or will ESXi sort all of that out when the time comes?

thanks

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

ESXi will reformat the USB device and create the required partitions on it. Btw. 1GB is sufficient.

André

[mattg1]

excellent thanks for the help guys