What are your thoughts on installing ESXi on flash versus local storage

[Ubuntu111]

Is anyone installing ESXi on a flash drive instead of local storage? If so what are the pros and cons? Would you use flash for all environments or only smaller ones? How reliable is flash compared to local storage (w// RAID)? Thanks for any feedback.

[DSTAVERT]

ESXi was designed to run from flash. Most larger server manufacturers, HP, DELL, IBM, Fujitsu, etc. offer ESXi on USB flash or SD cards as an order item option. There is very little writing to the disk. Logs are written to ramdisk. I believe it is the best way to install.

[AndreTheGiant]

How reliable is flash compared to local storage (w// RAID)?

Maybe is less reliable... but more flexible.

ESXi is very small, you can backup your configuration and rebuild it... or simple clone your flash on a USB key, just to have a backup in case of boot failure.

Andre

[Ubuntu111]

Thanks for the replies:)

[AndreTheGiant]

You're welcome.

See also:

Andre