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Can I boot ESXi from an SD card while placing OSDATA on my SAN?

Duncan Epping · Nov 16, 2021 · 1 Comment

I see this question popping up all the time, literally twice a day on our VMware internal slack, can I boot ESXi from an SD card while placing OSDATA on my SAN? I guess people are confused after reading this article. It is probably a result of skim-reading as the article is in-depth and spells it out to the letter. If you look at the following table then it mentions FCoE and iSCSI:

However, FCoE, iSCSI, and FC would only be supported when you boot from SAN, only then is OSDATA supported on a SAN device. When you boot from USB/SD, OSDATA will need to reside on a locally attached device. In other words, the answer to the original question is: no you cannot boot ESXi from an SD card and place OSDATA on your SAN. Again, for details, read this excellent document.

Booting ESXi from SD/USB devices? Time to reconsider when buying new hardware!

Duncan Epping · Sep 17, 2021 · 26 Comments

We’ve all seen those posts from people about worn-out SD/USB devices, or maybe even experience it ourselves at some point in time. Most of you reading this probably also knew there was an issue with 7.0 U2, which resulted in USB/SD devices wearing out a lot quicker. Those issues have been resolved with the latest patch for 7.0 U2. It has, however, resulted in a longer debate around whether SD/USB devices should still be used for booting ESXi, and it seems that the jury has reached a verdict.

On the 16th of September, a KB article was published by VMware, which contains statements around the future of SD/USB devices. I can be short about it, if you are buying new hardware make sure to have a proper persistent storage device, USB/SD is not the right choice going forward! Why? The volume of reads/writes to and from the OS-DATA partition continues to increase with every release, which means that the lower grade devices will simply wear out faster. Now, I am not going to repeat word for word what is mentioned in the KB, I would just like to urge everyone to read the KB article, and make sure to plan accordingly! Personally, I am a fan of M.2 flash devices for booting. They are not too expensive(greenfield deployments), plus they can provide enterprise-grade persistent storage to store all your ESXi related data. Make sure to follow the requirements around endurance though!

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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