The only downside to this, is it does require extra up front configuration, since you need to set up LUNs and zoning.
#Install vm esxi 6.5 install#
Once you configure your host to boot from SAN, which you would do on whatever hardware vendor management system you are using, you install ESXi as you normally would. Install ESXi on a SAN LUN (Boot ESXi from SAN)Īlternatively, you can boot your ESXi hosts from a SAN LUN.
#Install vm esxi 6.5 how to#
For information on how to do this, see VMWare KB 1033696 – Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 4.x/5.x/6.x. Don’t worry, there are lots of easy ways to set this up, but you are going to need some sort of persistent storage like a VMFS or NFS volume to do it on, which of course you would have anyway for your VMs to live on. This can be an issue if you encounter problems with your ESXi host and need to look at the logs.Īnother less important reason is the ESXi scratch partition needs to be placed on persistent storage, or you are going to see lots of annoying error messages. If you do not have your ESXi scratch partition on persistent storage, you will lose anything on the partition when you reboot your ESXi host. The most relevant reason to do this is in case you run into an issue with ESXi. One important aspect of your VMware vSphere installation is the ESXi scratch partition. This would not be recommended for production use, since there are too many ways to damage an external USB stick like the one above, but hey, it worked in a pinch! The ESXi Scratch Partition
In a pinch in your lab, you can also use whatever USB stick you have handy, like a VMware Fusion 4 USB stick! You can even boot ESXi from USB! In the enterprise servers of today, there is an internal USB slot for just such an occasion. The only downside to this is it can require some additional configuration. I’ve seen far less SD card failures in hosts than HDD failures (this is just my anecdotal evidence, of course, your may have seen the opposite). You can mirror SD cards just like you would a HDD, and have those drive bays available for other things. Now, SD cards are plenty big and plenty cheap, but this wasn’t the case years ago, so this boot method wasn’t as common, even if it was supported. Install ESXi on a SD Card or USB Stick (Boot ESXi From SD Card/USB Stick)īooting from SD cards is one of my favorite methods of booting ESXi. If you are considering booting from a SSD, you may want to take a look at your budget and see if you can use the money you were purchasing those boot SSDs with for something else, or keep the SSDs for caching and boot from SD cards. You could also boot from an SSD in a drive bay of course, but those are even more expensive than HDDs, so I’m not going to really mention them. This is especially true of blade servers, which may only have two valuable HDD bays. The only downside is that HDDs are expensive, and quite honestly, there is better things to do with those disks with the current versions of ESXi, such as vSphere Flash Read Cache, or host cache for swapping (not that you would ever be in a situation where you were swapping, right?). Mirroring the hard drive protects against hard drive failure.
This was something I used to do almost all of the time, about ten years ago. When I say local disk, I mean a Hard Disk Drives that are in a drive bay in the server. Install ESXi on Local Disk (Boot ESXi From Local Disk) I am going to explain the ones I have commonly encountered, and some of the pros and cons of each. Heres the deal: when we talk about installation locations with ESXi, we often refer to them as boot locations. Now, let’s take a look at the various options we have when it comes to installing the ESXi component of a VMware vSphere environment. In fact, one of the first things you will do is to install ESXi, since you need a place to install the VMware vCenter Server Appliance.īeyond the how of installing ESXi, you will have to ask yourself the question “Where will I install ESXi?”. One key task in this process is to install ESXi, or the hypervisor itself. While it is not hard to install VMware products, making a few decisions up front can make things a lot easier later on.
When it comes to setting up a new VMware vSphere environment, there are many things that must be considered.
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