is anyone running esxi4 from a usb stick on hp servers?

[friedchicken]

Hi All,

i currently have a large number of hp dl380 g5 servers running esx3.5 on internal raid1 disks.

we are looking to upgrade them to hp's version of esxi4 and use boot from usb as the dl380 has an internal usb port for this purpose. The problam i have is that vmwares support stance (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1010574) is that the usb stick must be supported by the hardware vendor. In this case, hp only list one specific hp part usb stick which has been discontinued and no distributer has any anywhere!

i have spoken with hp technical support and their stance is that they will only support that part - if you have one already and it fails they will swap it out (therefore their spares department must have a stash somewhere).

This is really frustrating as naturely we want to be fully supported if we went this route.

Lots of people must be running these servers as hosts so i'm really suprised hp are being so obtuse.

Is anyone running on usb sticks? can you advise what make/model you are using? have you encountered any problems?

any info you may have had in this area would be appreciated.

thanks in advance.

[AntonVZhbankov]

>Is anyone running on usb sticks? can you advise what make/model you are using? have you encountered any problems?

Yes. I run some ESXi's on HP shipped sticks, don't know actual manufacturer.

I has some problems with them, HP even released bulletin about and swapped my green aluminum sticks with black plastic sticks No problems since.

Actually, if you don't wanna pay HP 50 or 100$ for USB flash - take any good vendor 1-2 GB sticks.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[friedchicken]

thats good to know thanks.

i just dont want to buy a load of pny (for example) usb sticks and then 6 months down the line getting a vsphere error and vmware support turning around and saying they are not going to help because i'm using non supported hardware!!

has anyone ran into support issues with vmware support and usb?

thanks.

[Exwork]

Was this the HP advisory you are referring to?

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01957637&lang=en&cc=us&taskI...

[AntonVZhbankov]

No. It's second problem with HP USB sticks I see.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru