The solutions is simple, perform a format of the SD card in UCSM before installing VMware ESXi. The format option can be found under: Equipment - Servers - Select the server - Inventory - Storage – Controller - Select the FlexFlash controller - Format SD Cards.
OK, I just bought a fancy (for me) server for my workplace.
This makes me happy.
We're a small shop, so I try and take opportunities to learn and try new things when they're presented to me. (provided its safe/won't hurt the company or effect reliability.)
The new server (DL380G9 with dual E5 2620v4's, 64gb RAM) has a microSD slot on the motherboard.
Can I install ESX on it, and will there be any ramifications?
Personally, I've had SD cards slowly flake out on me, but usually after sitting for literally years.
Questions:
If I get a 32GB SD card (8GB minimum recommended) will it provision and wear level?
Will it effect performance?
Is this a stupid idea?
Basically, The thought of eating up 8GB of super expensive SSD storage for the host system bugs me. A Sandisk Ultra 32GB SD card is less than 20 bucks.
IF, in the event the SD card goes bad, isn't it a simple case of just re-installing ESX on a new SD card, and ESX will pick up the guests on storage? (this is a newb question, I've had a failure of a host system before.)
Thanks in advance.
Thanks all, I'm doin it.
Annoyance is that there's only One SD card slot on the DL380G9, But due to the fact that alarms will go off if the SD card fails and I can still back up 'running config' to a new SD card, (Plus I rarely change configuration) I think we're good to go.
An SD (SDHC) card installed in an HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 server running VMware ESXi just failed :(
I encountered some ominous looking messages on the vCenter console and in the HP ProLiant ILO event log...
Lost connectivity to the device ... backing the boot filesystem. As a result, host configuration changes will not be saved to persistent storage.
Embedded Flash/SD-CARD: Error writing media 0, physical block 848880: Stack Exception.
VMware advocates the use of USB and SD (SDHC) boot devices for ESXi. It was one of the main reasons the smaller footprint ESXi was developed (versus the older ESX). I've spent much time highlighting the differences between ESXi's installable and embedded modes to coworkers and clients. However, these failures do seem to happen. In this case, this is my third instance.
Luckily, this is a vSphere cluster with SAN storage. What steps should be taken to remediate this failure?
4 Answers
Here's the process I used to resolve this:
VMware ESXi can be installed in an embedded mode or an installable mode. As outlined here, the installation mode is determined by the destination media and the size of the volume available to the ESXi installer.
- USB, SDHC or any device less than 5GB in size:Embedded
- Hard drives/volumes greater than or equal to 5GB in size:Installable
One of the unique attributes of running ESXi in embedded mode is that the OS is loaded into RAM and only touches the USB/SD device hourly during normal operation. In my situation, the system continued to operate, even with a failed SDHC device.
The error message I received in the vCenter interface indicated that configuration changes would not be saved, but the cluster was still usable. I left the system in this state for several days until I could get to the datacenter to replace the SD card.
With regard to steps to take following a failure of a USB or SD device, it is important to extract and save a copy of your host's settings!!
This is easily accomplished via PowerCLI or the vSphere CLI. I used PowerCLI running from the vCenter server:
- Following that, I evacuated all virtual machines from the affected host and placed it in maintenance mode.
- The host was then shut down, the SDHC card replaced with a new device, and I installed ESXi again.
- Once the host was up again with a fresh ESXi install, I made the bare minimum configuration changes needed to make the host visible on the network; set IP information, vlan info and password.
- I reloaded the saved configuration to the host via PowerCLI...
For this step, I used:
Restoring the configuration forces a host reboot. Once up again, I was able to issue a reconnect to rejoin the host in vCenter and exit maintenance mode.
If PowerCLI not available, the ESXi shell commands look like:
![Download esxi 6.7 Download esxi 6.7](https://filedb.experts-exchange.com/incoming/2016/11_w48/1129034/Download-VMware-vSphere-Hypervisor-f.jpg)
This produces a web link that you'll be able to browse to and download a tarball of the host's configuration.
You can SCP a configuration file to a host and use the following to restore the settings.
That's all!
ewwhiteKB article: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/documentLinkInt.do?micrositeID=&popup=true&languageId=&externalID=2004784
Note: In the event that your original SD flash card or USB drive fails, these steps can be used in a disaster recovery capacity to get a fully functional ESXi host running as quickly as possible on a replacement USB drive or SD flash card.
Disaster Recovery Scenario
If you have a local datastore containing production information and have completed the installation on a replacement USB flash drive or SD flash card in a disaster recovery scenario, you may be required perform these additional steps:
- Connect to the ESXi host using the vSphere Client or add the ESXi host to an existing vCenter Server implementation.
- Click the host.
- Click the Configuration tab.
- Click Storage.
- Click Rescan to ensure you can see all datastores.
- Browse the datastore and register any virtual machines that are located on the datastores.
I'd say just reinstall ESXi fresh on a new card, it's not worth your time or effort to try to preserve the potentially corrupt data on the current card.
Shane Madden♦Shane MaddenOne of my hosts showed the same 'Lost connectivity' error. I googled and found this post. So I tried to backup the configuration with PowerCLI and vCLI as suggested. Backup came back with 'Internal error'. Called VMWare. The answer is that when the SD failed, you won't be able to backup your configuration because the backup command can only pull the configuration from the SD card.