To quote Gostev: Friends don’t let friends use anything but enterprise grade hardware RAID controllers with Battery Backed Write Cache.
Well, now we’ve got another phrase we need to add:
Friends don’t let friends use SD/USB for their VMware environments.
VMware have just updated their KB regarding SD/USB support.
Full details are here however the key takeaways are:
- VMware strongly advises that you move away completely from using SD card/USB as a boot device option on any future server hardware.
- Starting from the next major vSphere release, SD cards/USB media as a standalone boot device will not be supported. SD cards cannot be used to store the OSDATA partition, and an additional persistent device will be required.
- SD cards can continue to be used for the bootbank partition provided that a separate persistent local device to store the OSDATA partition (32GB minimum, 128GB recommended) is available in the host
Preferably, the SD cards should be replaced with an M.2 or another local persistent device as the standalone boot option.
The article is well worth a read as it gives scenarios for what to do with both 7.x and the next major vSphere version.
