I have what seems to be a basic question, but I’m not finding out a clear answer.
We’ve been using HP blades for our VMWare installations, and using two SAS disks in a RAID1 for the ESXi install.
We’re about to go through a refresh and replace some of our older ones with new ones. I’d like to look at using SD cards for the ESXI install instead. I know it’s a common configuration, but I’m getting confused on the persistent scratch partition.
As I understand it, when you install ESXI on an SD or USB drive, it doesn’t create the persistent storage for the logs and core dump and that you have to create them on a SAN drive, local hard disk, etc.
However, I’m also seeing articles that if you have an 8GB SD card or higher, it WILL create the persistent storage.
The VMWare vSphere 6 documentation center talks about “high quality drives of 4GB or larger are sufficient to hold the extended coredump partition”.
KB article 2004784 talks about working around the limitation of no scratch partition by modifying the boot.cfg file.
I have a new DL360 G9 server. I put an HP 32GB SD card in it and installed ESXI6 (the HP customized ISO). The install went fine, but when I check the advanced settings, the scratch location is set to “/tmp/scratch”. This is the ramdisk, correct?
I would really prefer to keep the scratch partition local. Is there any supported way to have ESXi create it on the SD card?