ESXI boot SSD

DiscoDave

DiscoDave

DiscoDave

Associate
Joined
6 Jun 2005
Posts
1,856
Location
Cambridge
To echo previous comments - It doesn't really matter. Once the hypervisor is loaded it resides in RAM. The SSD isn't going to give you much performance increase except possibly for bootup times.

Stick to a cheap USB drive but if you're fixed on getting a SSD then just get the cheapest one.
 

Muel

Muel

Muel

Soldato
OP
Joined
26 Jun 2009
Posts
3,023
Location
Sheffield
I've read that an SSD can be a big advantage because if the system runs out of RAM then ESXI will use up the spare space on the boot drive as the "page file", which offers far better performance than a USB stick/SD card.

I can only fit 16gb in the system and I only have 8gb now, so it's likely I'll run out.

Also my motherboard doesn't have an internal USB port, so booting from a pen drive won't be all that easy. (Unless I hack together something to fit on the USB headers for the front USB ports?)

USB2 only as well...
 

Muel

Muel

Muel

Soldato
OP
Joined
26 Jun 2009
Posts
3,023
Location
Sheffield
Thinking about it, I can't trust a flash drive enough to boot from it. I've had at least 5 die on me in as many years. I'd rather spend £30-60 on an SSD than save £55 and have to fix it in a years time.
 

ecksmen

ecksmen

ecksmen

Associate
Joined
25 Jun 2004
Posts
1,276
Location
.sk.dkwop.
Muel said:
I've read that an SSD can be a big advantage because if the system runs out of RAM then ESXI will use up the spare space on the boot drive as the "page file", which offers far better performance than a USB stick/SD card.

I can only fit 16gb in the system and I only have 8gb now, so it's likely I'll run out.

Also my motherboard doesn't have an internal USB port, so booting from a pen drive won't be all that easy. (Unless I hack together something to fit on the USB headers for the front USB ports?)

USB2 only as well...
Click to expand...

ESXi will not use the boot partitions for Swap. What you've read or been told is miss-informed. Boot of usb stick, 2GB is sufficent. Install and run your VMs if possible from SSD.

You can specify an SSD as a cache, or a a portion of it to be cache. SWAP files will only be used after memory ballooning.

If you're using SWAP a lot, SSD will help but don't expect it to be a silver bullet to low RAM or massively over committed RAM. You'd have to be running a lot of VMs to actually fill 16GB. Transparent pages and memory compression is amazing at reducing labs and even production environments of actual memory usage.

USB 2 isn't a problem, ESX installed is only a few hundred MB - after booting it runs out of memory, it only writes logs and configuration changes. We've had ESX running purely out of RAM without issues when memory sticks have failed long before.
 
Last edited:

ASE001

ASE001

ASE001

Associate
Joined
2 Jan 2007
Posts
277
Location
Stoke-on-trent
I use a 120Gbyte SSD as the boot disk on my ESX server. The ESX server then has additional three 1Tbyte drives attached.

I have NAS4Free running as Virtual machine on this ESX server which I have configured to use the three 1Tbyte drives as ZFS storage. This is used to provision shared NFS storage to this and other ESX servers for further virtual machines. The spare capacity on the SDD I use as ZFS disk cache to improve performance.

This all works a treat, yes it's compromise but it works well for me.
 

Deleted member 138126

D

Deleted member 138126

Muel said:
Thinking about it, I can't trust a flash drive enough to boot from it. I've had at least 5 die on me in as many years. I'd rather spend £30-60 on an SSD than save £55 and have to fix it in a years time.
Click to expand...
Buy a name-brand USB memory stick if you're worried about it failing. All our production ESXi hosts at work boot off internal SD and micro-SD cards. It is literally only used during boot, and the OS resides entirely in memory from then on. Logs and anything else that needs to be written are put on one of the datastores (ESXi picks one at random). Nothing is written to the boot volume.
 

unclepablo

unclepablo

unclepablo

Associate
Joined
9 Jul 2006
Posts
130
As a VCP and I'd echo these comments. I always use flash storage for production as well as test environments.

Using an SSD for boot is a waste of money and resources. How often do you plan on rebooting an ESXi host?! :)

By all means use an SSD for storing the VM's but I would spend the money on RAM first.. get that 16GB upgrade.

You can remove the USB stick once the host is booted so I wouldn't worry about it sticking out of the PC (you'll have local datastores for the log files).

In the unlikely event that the USB stick does get corrupted, it's a 20-30 minute job to create a new ESXi host on a clean drive.

All of the VM configuration is stored with the VM's in VMX files.

Don't worry - you'll be fine! :D
 

Muel

Muel

Muel

Soldato
OP
Joined
26 Jun 2009
Posts
3,023
Location
Sheffield
Hmmmmm, I guess booting from a USB drive would also give me the advantage of keeping a SATA port open, my board only has 5 of them so that'd be a good idea!

Think I'm going to do it, cheers guys. :)

Even though I hate the things... It's worth noting that I've only ever bought flash drives from good manufacturers, like Crucial, and they've all died in a matter of months.
 
Last edited:

Deleted member 138126

D

Deleted member 138126

Muel said:
Hmmmmm, I guess booting from a USB drive would also give me the advantage of keeping a SATA port open, my board only has 5 of them so that'd be a good idea!

Think I'm going to do it, cheers guys. :)

Even though I hate the things... It's worth noting that I've only ever bought flash drives from good manufacturers, like Crucial, and they've all died in a matter of months.
Click to expand...
You must be doing it wrong. ;)

Make sure you get a little stubby one so it doesn't stick out and get snapped off by accident.
 

coolamasta

coolamasta

coolamasta

Associate
Joined
9 Jan 2010
Posts
739
Location
Sunny Brizzol
I'm using a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 for my ESXi 5.0 host, been running it for nearly 2 years without issue, as well as it running ESXi I also have a 40GB VM server on it running my domain controller and then other drives for all the other VM's :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom