Reliable USB drives to install ESXi after several failures with Sandisk and HP (PNY) drives

[mephistopoa]

Hi guys,

I have the practice of install all ESXi hosts to USB drives, ranging from Sandisk Cruzer fit (8GB and 16GB) to the HP V165W (4,8 and 16GB) tiny USB drive that is manufacture by PNY. Ive been having several issues with Cruzer fit disappearing from the OS, sometimes rebooting the server makes it come back, most of the times it doesn't The HPs are rarely dropping like the cruzer fit, but some hosts I updated ESXi simply refused to boo. ESXi then was updated manually using a CD on the server and also the machine doesn't boot from the USB any more. Replacing the disk and installing ESXi all over again resolves the problem.

I'm looking for some proper USB drives to have ESXI installed and the main focus is reliability. Do you guys have any suggestions please?

Regards,

Alex

[vTagion]

I am currently using the cruzer fit and it seems to be working just fine for me. I have also used the ADATA Amazon.com: ADATA DashDrive Series UV128 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive, Black/Blue (AUV128-16G-RBE): Computers & Acce… for over a year and they have worked great.

HTH

[mephistopoa]

I'm glad you didn't have problems with the cruzerfit, I had about 30 of them installed across many different clients and got already 6 hosts down because of this problem. It was very frustrating as they very supposed to be very reliable, no writes being done, ESXi loaded straight to memory. Anyway, I had some problems even with the HPs that are quite reliable. The other USB 3.0 drive you showed me may be good but the psychical size is juts not good for datacentre applications where we can't have a USB key hanging out of the rack but thanks for suggesting :smileyhappy:

[JarryG]

You may try some SLC-based USB-sticks, i.e. Imation IronKey (basic, personal, enterprise), Mach Xtreme MX-ES or Winkom Pendrive. Of course, they costs "a little" more, and you could actually buy small SLC/SSD for about the same price. Personally I prefer using CompactFlash cards (always two of them). They are more targeted on pro-market than any other common flash-cards or usb-sticks...

But I'm surprise you have problems like these. Normally drive with esxi is used only during boot-up: image is loaded into memory, and drive is not used again (unless you use this drive for something else).

[mephistopoa]

Hi Jarry,

Thanks for the suggestions, the Mach Xtreme MX-ES seems to be very cheap for a SLC usb drive and also has 5 year warranty, that is very good. The only problem is the size of the physical drive. Do you know about any other manufactures that would have these disks in smaller size?

Some of the HP servers I have are HPs Proliant 380 G7, so no CF card reader unfortunatelly but the Dell R720XD looks like that has the CF reader. Any brand/model of cards you would recommend  for this type of application? What would you say about a USB to CF adapter? Any good in your opinion for this application?

Yeah the drive is used for booting but the logs if you don't set up properly keep being written to it like the scratch logs. Anyway with them I had also the idea of just reads once it boots up and that is it. Then eventually the drives disappear from the host, ESXi is still working fine because it is loaded on memory but my monitoring system and some other things would need access to the USB disk once in a while and then I have problems. Very annoying.

I also got a different problem even more annoying, the USB drive seems to be working fine, then you update ESXi and reboot it just to find out that the host got stuck during loading ESXi. You try to update it manually using the CD and nothing, fresh installation and also nothing. It simply gets screwed up.

[mephistopoa]

What type of servers accept dual CF cards? do you buy adapters or something? How do you do it?

[JarryG]

I use CompactFlashf2SATA adapters, bought ~10 of them on eBay for a few bucks each. So even if it is CF-card (I use Transcend, have 30 years warranty and I never had any problems with them), it acts as though it was SATA-disk. But I do not create raid1, I use two independent CF-cards with (most of time) identical copies of ESXi. If after updating ESXi I screw something, I reboot with the other CF. Did not have to do it untill now, but I want to be sure as my ESXi-server is 50 miles away (of course, I have dedicated remote KVM-console access per network so I can play with bios or even install ESXi remotely)...

[mephistopoa]

I've found some on ebay but this one got more my attention:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-Port-Dual-SD-SDHC-MMC-RAID-to-SATA-Converter-Adapter-No-SD-Card-Size-Limit-/181038185658?pt=UK_Computing_Drive_Cables_Adapters&hash=item2a26b77cba

It is a dual SD SATA reader, it can do RAID1. Dual CF would be lovely but I would need to spare more space for them and cables. The point with the USB device was to also make one SAS/SATA bay available to other things.

Perhaps a USB RAID1 device that can hold 2 SDs?

[Rubeck]

mephistopoa wrote:

Some of the HP servers I have are HPs Proliant 380 G7, so no CF card reader unfortunatelly...

But they have an onboard SD card reader.... I have 11 of these in a cluster booting of a HP 4GB card... No problems yet during the 7 months they've been running.

/Rubeck

[mephistopoa]

Yeah I've noticed on the manuals, this is one of few clients that I have which uses HP servers so I was not aware of the SD card slot on the motherboard.

I was looking around and the Dell R720XD that I have across some clients has even dual SD reader from factory that can do RAID 1, so it is perfect, the R710 might not have SD readers, but perhaps in that case I'll need to go for a SLC USB drive anyway as buying the DS card module will cost £60 plus the SD card, which ends up being better simply getting the USB SLC drive and use the internal port.

I've found the Integral Endurance SD to be the best overall SLC SD card, so that will be my choice from now and on regarding ESXi installations. the 4GB model costs £19 in the UK. Not bad.

[Intel233]

If I install on a 32GB USB flash drive do I need to worry about the scratch dir?