Installing ESXi 5 on a usb flash drive

[peter79]

Guys,

What is the minimum space required when installing ESXi 5 on a usb flash drive?

Regards.

[schepp]

Hi,

I stumbled over this once, since it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere in the official documents, not in the Knowledge base and not in the vSphere 5 Guides.

But if you run the installation it asks you to "select a disk that has a capacity greater than 910 MiB".

So that would be the answer I guess :smileywink:

Regards

[peter79]

That would make sense all right :smileylaugh:.  I have found some people in other forums saying they were running ESXi from 1 GB keys.

[mouradb]

I've done mine on a 1 GB  USB stick and working fine!

[chriswahl]

I'd recommend at least a USB 2.0 device to avoid long boot times, or USB 3.0 if you can find it.

[maishsk]

1GB

From the Documentation

Storage Requirements for ESXi 5.0 Installation
Installing  ESXi 5.0 requires a boot device that is a minimum of 1GB in size. 
When  booting from a local disk or SAN/iSCSI LUN, a 5.2GB disk is required to 
allow for the creation of the VMFS volume and a 4GB scratch partition on the 
boot device.  If a smaller disk or LUN is used, the installer will attempt to 
allocate a scratch region on a separate local disk.  If a local disk cannot be 
found the scratch partition, scratch, will be located on the ESXi host ramdisk, 
linked to /tmp/scratch.  You can reconfigure scratch to use a separate disk 
or LUN.  For best performance and memory optimization, VMware recommends that 
you do not leave scratch on the ESXi host ramdisk.
To reconfigure /scratch, see Set the Scratch Partition from the vSphere Client.
Due to the I/O sensitivity of USB and SD devices the installer does not create a 
scratch partition on these devices. As such, there is no tangible benefit to using 
large USB/SD devices as ESXi uses only the first 1GB. When installing on USB 
or SD devices, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available 
local disk or  datastore.  If no local disk or datastore is found, /scratch is 
placed on the ramdisk.  You should reconfigure /scratch to use a persistent 
datastore following the installation.

Maish

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Author of VMware vSphere Design

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