Local HD or USB storagedevice?

[Tekoloshe]

Hi everybody,

I am quite new to VMware so I need your advice.

We are planning a cluster of 2 ESXi Host connected to a Storage via iSCSI. The VMs on that cluster will not be under very heavy load.

My Question is know, is it suffient to have a simple storage device like an USB Stick to run the ESXi or would you recommend to have local HDs?

Thank you for your help!

Best regards!

[suprauche]

Hello,

If that will be a production environment, i would strongly recommend you to use at least a local storage with some raid configuration. You know there are some restrictions and customizations you should do like - adjusting the timeout value not to sleep the usb device if it becomes idle -. Also you could see high i/o wait times. Another problem is safety of your data. How can you tolerate and recover your data if your usb disk just crashes?

Finally, it works, but i do not recommend it surely.

[Tekoloshe]

Thank you, I will consider that !

What about SWAP, does ESXi need / uses local SWAP.

[suprauche]

ESXi works without swap space but If you do not configure it, then you won't able to join your ESXi to a HA cluster. You can store those swap files within the existing vmfs datastores.

Best Regards,

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to ESXi forum as this is an ESXi specific question.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
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