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ESXi booting from USB drive

M

mt_100

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 15, 2006
Messages
342
I have searcher and posted on VM-Help.com and thought I would try here as well.

I have a 30GB USB hard drive and ESXi booting from it. There is of course about 27GB of wasted space on it that I wish ESXi could use for a datastore so I could take a few VMs with me.

Has anyone got it working?
 
not unless you figure out how to make USB storage appear as a SCSI block device

update: you COULD run workstation 7 on your rig, and then an ESX(i) VM inside of Workstation 7, storing the ESXi VMs disk on the USB key. the ESXi VM could have the entire USB key, and be the "host" for double nested VMs sitting on it's "disk" which would all be on the USB stick.

plug in the USB stick, and open workstation, double click the ESXi .vmx file, and viola! you'd have access to the entire environment
 
Yep, and there is the problem. I was hoping since it could see the USB from booting from it that it could use it. Oh well.

I thought about the workstation idea as well but what I was really looking for was a completely independent environment that didn't rely on another OS to initially boot up like Windows.

Wondering if I could somehow boot a Linux distro from the USB drive, run VM Workstation inside it with an ESXi host, then store the VMs on the same USB drive as a share from the original Linux host....hmmm.
 
you wouldn't want to run esxi inside of WS for anything real - just for testing.
 
Correct, this is only for testing. Sort of a way to bring a test server, and clients, and support machines to a site for quick testing without actually bringing machines.
 
By testing I mean "Hey look, that's what ESXi does" - not usable vms. The vm-in-a-vm will be slow as snot.
 
yeah, tell me about it. why haven't you re-written the code base to fix this, yet? :)

OP: yes, you could very well do exactly what you proposed. You will (as always) be limited to the relative performance constraints of whatever the slowest system component is. In this particular scenario, it's likely to be the random access and read speeds of a disk that is being accessed over the USB bus. It will likely get very ugly, very fast.
 
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