installing esx 4.0 on to a usb drive - anyone had any issues?

[a2alpha]

Hi,

I am planning an installation onto a blade and rather than installing esx 4 onto internal hard drives I was hoping to install it onto an internal usb drive. This means that I can use the space in blade for extra memory. I know this will work with ESXi but I would really rather use full blown esx 4 as I am more used to the way it works.

Anyone had any experience / issues / comments / limitations with this?

Thanks in advance,

[a2alpha]

Will do some testing

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

The reason that ESXi works is that it is designed to make minimal writes to the USB disk. ESX isn't and will do lots of writes. You may have success but I wouldn't count on it being safe for long. ESXi can install on a 1GB flash drive. You probably need at least 10GB for ESX. A small SSD? HP blades are starting to come with them. Non hot swap interestingly enough.

[a2alpha]

Thanks for the info, I think i'm going to try using ESXi for a bit and see if I miss the service console.

Cheers,

Dan

[DSTAVERT]

The first thing to add is the VMA appliance. Most of your console skills will transfer well. Make sure you go through the vifp section in the documentation for VMA. Once you add your servers and authentication to the appliance working with the hosts is slick.

[a2alpha]

Thanks very much for the advice. I will get started.

Dan