Kevin Parenteau wrote: Therefore I need to exhaust my options to see about making this request work for them. MTBF on a single enterprise grade M.2 drive is going to be far higher than a pair of SD Cards. I've seen HUNDREDS of those mirrored SD cards fail to deliver on their promises (On clusters from Sydney and Aukland to Germany). While your shopping for drives make sure to get a 512N M.2. I'd rather have 1 high quality M.2/NVMe device above 2 of those any day of the week. I've personally had a few dozen fail in my lab (combined with low read endurance SD cards Dell used to ship) and the Pseudo raid chipset in them just isn't worth a damn in my opinion. They also replicate corrupt data (there's no real ECC engine on them). Kevin Parenteau wrote: Much like the dual SD card modules running mirrored mode for Dell PowerEdge servers, etc.Ībout those SD cards modules. StorageNinja Normally as a VMware Professional, I would agree with you and I have expressed my stance on this matter being similar to your comment, however my management has requested that the OS itself be considered redundant on the hosts where the installation lives.īoot from SAN, or AutoDeploy PXE boot the hosts from something that's redundant? (Although I've never tested FC boot from SAN to a Mini). We have seen articles demonstrating booting ESXi using NVMe PCIe adapters, but all are using a single drive.ĪNY suggestions to helping us find the bootable RAID1 piece of this puzzle will be greatly appreciated! Doesn't matter if it's in a PCIe format or SATA, but USB is not going to be an option from my management.
![macmin esxi usb boot macmin esxi usb boot](https://i0.wp.com/www.virtuallyghetto.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/mac-min-vsphere-6.png)
MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT INSTALL
So ultimately the goal is to have a small RAID1 (like 256GB) on NVMe or SATA that is bootable so we can install ESXi on it and gain the redundancy we're looking for. Can someone please confirm if this device will allow a RAID1 bootable scenario?
MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT FOR MAC
We have seen the Promise Pegasus J2i 8TB Internal Storage Enclosure for Mac Pro (link below), but for this application we have no need for that much local storage as these hosts will use an iSCSI shared target. Ideally with 2 NVMe drives in RAID1, but we would also consider SATA drives as well. Our goal with this is redundancy for our ESXi installation.
![macmin esxi usb boot macmin esxi usb boot](https://dsonstebo.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/vc3.png)
![macmin esxi usb boot macmin esxi usb boot](https://www.ivobeerens.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/boot.png)
We were sent an OWC Accelsior 4M2 from our vendor (link below), but it won't work for booting RAID1, and looking further, the details specifically say only a single drive is considered bootable so that won't work.
![macmin esxi usb boot macmin esxi usb boot](https://vinf.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/image3.png)
If you haven’t done so already, ensure your BIOS is set to boot from USB.įrom this point forward the installation of ESXi should proceed without that “No Network Adapter” error (if you are following form that last post) and when you choose a location to install ESXi to, make sure it’s also the USB drive.Greetings! We have the old trash can style Mac's currently running a small VMware cluster, and we're upgrading them to the new 2019 Mac Pro's as that environment is growing but having some difficulty doing so. Leaving all defaults alone, I hit start and continued when prompted that it would erase all data on the drive.Īt completion you can see the “Device” properties has be renamed to that of the Boot selection name that was selected.Įject the USB and pop it into the device you want to install it on.
MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT ISO
Insert the USB you plan to format and select the ISO (I am using the custom ISO created in the previous post). The tagline is “Create bootable USB drives the easy way.” This is only an executable that requires no install. This custom ISO should get around an error that prevented the base ESXi image installer to fail out with the message “No Network Adapters.” In that post a custom ESXi ISO image was created using PowerCLI to inject the necessary network driver.