Persistent storage on boot USB ESXi

[atakacs]

Hello

Is there any trick to define persistent storage on a bootable ESXi usb stick ?

It would be neat to be able to package some basic VMs on the same usb stick used to boot the server. Any idea how to do this ?

Regards

[a_p_]

I'm afraid there isn't a way to create a datstore on an USB device. Neither the GUI nor the command line offers an option to do this.

André

[atakacs]

Well worth triyng :smileyhappy:

Thanks

[continuum]

creating a VMFS volume on a USB-stick is possible with nasty tricks
but then using it as a valid datastore seems to be not allowed

[atakacs]

Would you elaborate on said nasty tricks :smileyhappy: ?

It would be really usefull to have a self contained ESXi boot & sotrage so I'd be willing to spend so time fidling around...

[continuum]

it will not help you ;-)

anyway ...
use a system with VMware Workstation.
Create new ESXi VM and assign a USB-drive or stick as a physical drive - do not attach it via USB !

This way the installer assumes you use a small harddrive and creates a small VMFS-volume.

I tried several variants of this approach - all the time a USB device was attached as a physical disk to either a new setup or to an existing one.