Yeah saw this floating around socials.  Have passed it along to the VMware group here at my company.

Just to add, before performing the upgrade, update the drivers on the ESXi hosts. Saves so much trouble later on down the line. 

Also, SD Cards are no longer recommended: SD card/USB boot device revised guidance (85685) (vmware.com)

The compatibility matrix is really useful too: Product Interoperability Matrix (vmware.com)

Finally, your server vendor may already have a customised version of ESXi that has been tested for that particular model so always worth checking there first. 

SD cards are supported still in 7.3, but not recommended and will be totally not supported in 8.0

I was talking to a VMware tech about this and they had serious issues with SD cards in the beginning of 7.0, but have been resolved.   Move your log files from the ESX hosts to your SAN datastores (best practice either way) and you should be fine. 

I had some issues on 7.0 when it first came out, but I am on 7.3f and it has been fantastic. *Knocks on wood*

Hi @Scott, don’t know whether this will be good news or bad news for you, but SD cards will still be supported by not recommended in vSphere 8.0

Check out this table in the following KB article, (emphasis mine): https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85685

Hmm makes me want to put the installs back on USB thumb drive again so I can enable VSAN once more or wait for v8 and just use the second NVME for that? 

USB stick is essentially an SD card in a different format. Same idea, limited writes. 

SSD/NVME will be the only way going forward, or if you want a spinning hard drive. but a USB drive isn’t recommended either. 

Interesting, VMware support said it wasn’t going to be supported in 8.0. I guess vSphere.Next could mean anything. 

Maybe their will be a 7.5 

Either way. Supported, but not recommended means, it works, but you could have it fail and kill your host at any time.   

That’s like Samsung saying, they’ll support my phone if i drop it 20 times today, but they don’t recommend it.  If I break the screen it’s on me. As far as the OS goes however, I’m still supported.