VMware walks back ban on booting vSphere from SD cards or thumb drives

VMware has walked back its decision to end support for non-persistent removable storage as a boot medium for its vSphere suite. Virtzilla deprecated the feature in the early 2021 release of vSphere 7 Update 3, and in September advised it would not be supported in future releases. The company has now reversed that stance. An …

[Duncan Macdonald]

Failed system drive ?

If the system drive fails (and some SSDs die suddenly without giving any warning) or gets corrupted then some sort of removable drive is likely to be needed to restore operation. VMware should at a minimum allow for a "repair boot" from a removable drive to recover the system drive.

(Ideally the system drive would be in a RAID 1 configuration to survive a single drive failure - however beancounters often limit the amount of cash resulting in less than ideal setups.)

[J. Cook]

Re: Failed system drive ?

This is for companies that have the esxi installation on an SD card or USB drive for regular use.

Cisco's UCS platform has had a dual SD card "flexflash" controller as an option on their B and C series servers for several generations now; it works well enough. It's a mirrored setup, so that if one fails, the other keeps on going.

VMware wants to move away from that because of the high write cycles tend to shorten the lifespan of the media that's used.

[thondwe]

Hardware?

Seems likely the push back will be from Orgs which have a pile of relatively new "built for Vmware" kit which are booting from the internal SD card and with all the disk slots taken up with real storage assigned to VSAN etc, it'd be a major pain to reconfig them all?

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: Hardware?

Yes, although VMWare has changed where its heavy read/write operations are aimed at which I think is a good idea.

[Lennart Sorensen]

So if you can't boot your server from USB how do you install the OS in the first place? Clearly vmware is being incredibly stupid if they want to remove USB boot support from servers.

[Nate Amsden]

As the article states, on a local SSD, or I suppose a spinning disk would work fine too. All of my systems are boot from SAN (over fibrechannel).

Never liked the thought of cheap crap USB flash/SD card being a point of failure for a system that costed upwards of $30k+ for hardware+software (that goes all the way back to the earliest ESXi 3.5 I think?)

If you are large scale likely you may want to check out or are already using stateless esxi, basically boots from the network directly into memory. Sounds neat(never tried it), though seems like quite a bunch of extra work required for configuration hence more useful at larger scales (perhaps starting in the 100+ host range).

My two personal vsphere hosts(run in a colo) boot from local SSD RAID 10. My previous personal ESXi host(built in 2011) did boot from USB(and the flash drive died at one point fortunately it was a graceful failure), because the local RAID controller was not supported to boot(3Ware).

[RobBastiaansen]

Hi Lennart,

You can always boot the server from a USB device or DVD with an installation medium. What was deprecated is to then install the OS on a USB device or SD card which is normally placed on the motherboard. The server then boots from that internal USB device or SD card because the OS would be installed there.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the case - you are confusing installing and booting

Simple you install from USB - think about your comment for a second. When you do an install of ESXi from a USB key or SD what O/S are you using? (Hint you haven't installed ESXI yet....)

[Alex Brett]

I presume what's being pushed back against is the option for vendors to supply systems with an *internal* USB/SD card to boot from, rather than trying to get vendors to block booting from removable storage in the BIOS/UEFI firmware, which would be a very strange thing to do...

[Nate Amsden]

what is vsphere.next

I did a web search and found nothing.

[Cosby]

Re: what is vsphere.next

Just what will be vSphere 7.5 or 8 - the next major release

[Nate Amsden]

Re: what is vsphere.next

interesting ok, was fearing it was perhaps some kind of "rolling release" of vsphere.

[-v(o.o)v-]

It would be unfortunate when the support is discontinued.

But it does not matter much since modern systems have replaced SD card based solutions such as the Dell IDSDM with NVMe alternatives such as the Dell BOSS and I think that it is better that way.

[david 12]

Back to the future

What was it, 5, years ago? VMFS file stores on thumb drives were not supported, and the undocumented work around involved turning off USB support.