Plain Virtualization

Back in vSphere 7 there was mention of deprecation of USB and SD Card due to reliability issue of such storage disk used for ESXi installation. Often than not, even in my home lab, I always encounter these USB sticks failure causing my host to not boot up after shutting down or doing a restart. VMware has now official state the deprecation of such support starting from vSphere 8. Which means, vSphere 8.0 will be the last version to support such storage devices as ESXi installation disk. I believe most customer would have moved off USB and SD Card since vSphere mentioned previously. More servers nowadays also support SATADOM SSD which is ideally better than a normal server HDD which might be too huge and wasted for use. Do refer to this  KB  on information regarding this and I hope everyone should not be considering using any more USB or SD card.

Yes the official announcement for VSAN has been made.  I was not able to catch as it was 2am Singapore time.  However you can watch the launch recorded video here .   You can read about the release notes here . Do note of a known error which some might encounter when enable VSAN without any disk group and after removal the error message remain persistent.  I admit many like myself so not read release notes. Error Message: "vsan datastore datastore1 in cluster **** in datacenter **** does not have capacity" Cormac Hogan has also did a summary of the launched which is pretty lots of supported feature beyond what was release in beta.  E.g. from 8 nodes to 32 nodes and from 120,000 IOPS to 2 Million IOPS.  Vicardo has done upa nice table here on comparison.  David Hill has a very long table of limit for Public Beta here which I made some correction in my table below: Description Public Beta GA Minimum nodes ...

Finally took some time to upgrade my ESXi whitebox which is running on ESXi 4.1 with custom driver to support the onboard Marvell LAN chipset. The installation screen was different in this case and I took some pictures using my mobile.  My CD Rom happen not to work and I need to create a ESXi installer onto an UDB Drive to install on another USB Drive. First I would just go through the tools I used to create a USB installer. I use unetbootin version 5.55 and use the ESXi 5.0 installable image to create the USB installer. This time it works.  Unlike in ESXi 4.1, it has to be using version 4.94, any higher version breaks the installation. My ESXi 4.1 was installed on a 2GB USB disk.  So with ESXi 5.0 which required 4GB scratch disk, it is definitely not possible. I did some google of cause and found USBIT .  What it does is, it creates a backup (clone image) of my 2GB disk and restore to my 8GB disk.  That boots up proper.  But my 2GB disk cannot b...