VMWare ESXi on a CF card?

With one of these CF-SATA adapters: Addonics ADSAHDCF CF - SATA HDD Adapter

I remember something about CF cards being bad if something wrote a lot on it...(I have m0n0wall on a CF card right now, it just stores the config file on CF)

I'm not sure how active VMWare gets on the disk that it is installed on though...

Esxi is pretty have on disk usage during the normal startup, and shutdown of VMs. Also, you might do okay if you have the VMWare tools installed on the guest OS's. However, if any of the VMs starts paging memory to what it thinks is disk (which is actually just ESXi host RAM, most of the time). If the VM actually pages out to disk, and the ESXi host pages that to disk, you'll get absolutely killed in all running VMs. Also, any write operations to the VMs disk drives goes to the CF card on the ESXi host machine. In those circumstances where you're running multiple VMs and running Windows Updates, and doing concurrent writes on multiple VMs, you're gonna get screwed there too. If you want true performance from VMs in ESXi, you're going to need a few spindles, or a few CF cards in a RAID-0.

All that being said, I wouldn't even try.

I'm not sure if you took this into account or not, but the actual VMs would be on say a RAID-5 array on a hardware RAID controller. Only the ESXi install and boot would be off the CF-SATA card.

I've been doing some reading about people installing ESXi on USB drives, which requires hacks and stuff, doesn't sound fun, but the CF-SATA adapter seems like a good way to make it more legit.

Okay, I did some more reading, and it seems that the PowerEdge R805 has a built in SD card just for VMware. So I'm guessing that it should work fine!

Joony said:

I'm not sure if you took this into account or not, but the actual VMs would be on say a RAID-5 array on a hardware RAID controller. Only the ESXi install and boot would be off the CF-SATA card.

I've been doing some reading about people installing ESXi on USB drives, which requires hacks and stuff, doesn't sound fun, but the CF-SATA adapter seems like a good way to make it more legit.

Click to expand...

How would I have been able to take that into account when you made no mention of it, initially?

Yes, you can do it. It can be done. It's a cheap way to accomplish booting from a thumbdrive or CF (if that is your particular cup of tea). The only reason I would personally do it is to see if it can be done. I don't think your performance is going to be very good, however. I don't know of anyone that's serious about running a development environment that runs off of a CF or USB key. IBM and VMWare (and a lot of other VMWare partners) have tried to sell ESXi Embedded (which ships on a thumbdrive), but there's so many issues with the implementation it's ridiculous. Whoever thought doing this in the enterprise is a complete moron, IMO.

I'm sure it could be acceptable for a small home test development environment. I have gotten all too used to large SAN arrays and multiple trays filled with 16x 15k FC drives...I have become a spoiled bitch.

I run a few ESXi servers off of USB sticks. The only problem I ran into was that I had to use the Lexar BootIt! utility to mark them as "fixed" rather than "removable", otherwise the system would occasionally hang during startup.

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HP and Dell actually ship servers with specially certified (IE: high reliability) usb thumb drives. ESXi doesn't use the drive its running off of for vswap unless you are also putting VMs on it (wow that would be slow). Keep in mind ESXi is 32Mb and doesn't have a service console so there really isn't much to load/boot and once its online the hypervisor is operating 100% out of memory. We run a 4 node cluster in production of ESX on HP Dl380 G5s off the internally preinstalled HP thumbdrives and its just as fast as running it off a disk (and you aren't wasting 72GB of space on a 74GB mirrored pair just to hold a 32MB hypervisor). As a bonus the MTBF of the thumbdrives they use far exceeds that of even a Mirrored pair of SAS drives. And for anyone thats ever installed ESXi you'd know it would take less than 5 minutes to rebuilt it if the thumbdrive did fail.

irrision said:

And for anyone thats ever installed ESXi you'd know it would take less than 5 minutes to rebuilt it if the thumbdrive did fail.

Click to expand...

Yup. I've got one extra for each of my ESXi servers. That way, if one fails, all I need to do is plug the new one in and restore the config files. It's a 5 minute process, including the reboot.