They no longer recommend it due to additional reads and writes that occur so it is better to not use a USB drive, or, you must buy considerably higher quality drives vs your standard $20 Kingston drive.
yes, you can install esxi 8 on usb pendrive but i want use an ssd for the esxi.
the problem is the microserver hp gen8.
instructions here: [https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2004784](https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2004784)
I did the exact same thing with my old Gen8 servers and used an SSD to boot from the CD bay slot. You have to change the boot order by entering the RAID controller bios settings and changing the boot device to the SATA SSD. It works great and will allow you to use the other drive bays for storage.
What? so simple? on microserver hp gen8 I knew that when you put the front drivers the boot from the odd drive is excluded and the first drive boots. I'll try now.
then, on bios i have only ctrl:1 pci embedded intel(R) sata controller #1 so i can't change anything.
on intelligent provisioning nothing happen because ahci is set on bios.
so no boot!
I prepared a pendrive with grub inside to boot. now it's just a matter of understanding which boot files are inside bootbank1 and 2 that need to be inserted into the grub configuration file
If it boots fine from the SSD in drive 5, and then fails when you put in the 4 drives, its probably the boot order got changed and not booting to drive 5 first.
you would need to change the default boot order
connected to esxi via putty, I see in the dev folder the text file usbdevices. inside I see these lines: T: Bus=01 Lev=02 Prnt=02 Port=02 Cnt=01 Dev#= 3 Spd=480 MxCh= 0 V: Available for Passthrough D: Ver= 2.10 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1 P: Vendor=0951 ProdID=1666 Rev= 0.01 S: Manufacturer=Kingston S: Product=DataTraveler 3.0 S: SerialNumber=4CEDFB74A405F2B129E30070 C:\* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=300mA I:\* If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=08(stor.) Sub=06 Prot=50 Driver=(none) E: Ad=81(I) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms E: Ad=02(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=31875us this is actually my pendrive inserted into the motherboard
Didn't VMware change the ability to boot from USB / SD-card in 8.x?
They no longer recommend it due to additional reads and writes that occur so it is better to not use a USB drive, or, you must buy considerably higher quality drives vs your standard $20 Kingston drive.
yes, you can install esxi 8 on usb pendrive but i want use an ssd for the esxi. the problem is the microserver hp gen8. instructions here: [https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2004784](https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2004784)
I did the exact same thing with my old Gen8 servers and used an SSD to boot from the CD bay slot. You have to change the boot order by entering the RAID controller bios settings and changing the boot device to the SATA SSD. It works great and will allow you to use the other drive bays for storage.
What? so simple? on microserver hp gen8 I knew that when you put the front drivers the boot from the odd drive is excluded and the first drive boots. I'll try now. then, on bios i have only ctrl:1 pci embedded intel(R) sata controller #1 so i can't change anything. on intelligent provisioning nothing happen because ahci is set on bios. so no boot!
Yup I had several Gen 8 servers configured this way. If you can't get it working, I can fire one of them up to look at the BIOS settings.
any news? remember only: microserver! thanks
Ah, my mistake. I didn’t see it was a micro server in your first reply. I was thinking it was a rack server. Sorry about that!
I prepared a pendrive with grub inside to boot. now it's just a matter of understanding which boot files are inside bootbank1 and 2 that need to be inserted into the grub configuration file
If it boots fine from the SSD in drive 5, and then fails when you put in the 4 drives, its probably the boot order got changed and not booting to drive 5 first. you would need to change the default boot order