VMware to kill SD cards and USB drives as vSphere boot options
- Reference: 1633347072
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/10/04/vsphere_ends_non_persistent_boot_storage/
- Source link:
A [1]post last week delivered the news.
"ESXi Boot configuration with only SD card or USB drive, without any persistent device, is deprecated with vSphere 7 Update 3," the post states. "In future vSphere releases, it will be an unsupported configuration."
[2]
"In the near future, the only supported configuration involving the usage of SD card or USB drives as boot media is a minimum of 8GB SD card or USB drive + Locally attached persistent storage device for ESX-OSData partition," the post adds.
[3]
[4]
vSphere 7.x creates four partitions, with ESX-OSData generally the largest, being used to store ESX- ESXi configurations and system state data.
ESX-OSData therefore gets a fair bit of traffic. This worries VMware because, as the post states, SD cards and USB sticks "have lower endurance and exhibit reliability and issues over time."
[5]
"SD cards and USB drives may also exhibit performance issues and may not tolerate high-frequency read-write operations. We are now witnessing boot-related problems more frequently with ESXi 7.x with the hosts using SD cards or USB drives as boot media."
SD cards are not enterprise-grade storage options as they degrade after a certain number of reads and writes. VMware allowed their use "to free up device bays and lower the cost of installing ESXi hosts." USB drives can offer better reliability, but a decline in speed could impact overall operations.
Now that Virtzilla has seen issues with this, it appears the company would rather you take a hit on hosts' storage capacity in the service of greater reliability.
[6]
As vSphere hosts are generally quite finely tuned to serve the needs of the apps they exist to run, taking one drive out of action will mean pain for some.
[7]After eight years, SPEC delivers a new virtualization benchmark
[8]AWS EKS Anywhere (as long as it's VMware) hits full release
[9]VMware announces tech preview of Arm hypervisor – Fusion on Apple's M1 silicon
VMware has a little relief coming from another direction, in the form of a new [10]tool called "Virtual Machine Desired State Configuration" that allows VMs to reboot into new configurations without manual intervention, and in line with recommendations from the vRealize Operations management and automation suite.
VMware has plenty more, and bigger, announcements, to come as its VMworld conference opens on Tuesday this week. ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2021/09/esxi-7-boot-media-consideration-vmware-technical-guidance.html
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YVslT9UVFVmQ52OlR6EwNwAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YVslT9UVFVmQ52OlR6EwNwAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YVslT9UVFVmQ52OlR6EwNwAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YVslT9UVFVmQ52OlR6EwNwAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YVslT9UVFVmQ52OlR6EwNwAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/17/specvirt_datacenter_2021_virtualisation_benchmark/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/09/aws_eks_anywhere_as_long/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/09/vmware_fusion_m1_tech_preview/
[10] https://flings.vmware.com/virtual-machine-desired-state-configuration?s=03
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Nanny
Had to roll back twenty-seven hosts to 6.7 after boot issues on 7.0.
Absolute f****** shamble costing me and my team a full weekend.
Re: Nanny
Absolute f****** shamble costing me and my team a full weekend..." Pre-deployment testing? Rollback plan? Testing in between deployments? I would be genuinely interested how you got to 27 hosts before you noticed any issues. Surely you tested a limited number some time before a mass rollout?
Re: Nanny
It's one of those delightful issues that may not show obvious symptoms for days or weeks, so it's actually easy for people to do all the right testing and still miss this. If you're looking at the vmkernel log you *might* notice some extra churn before host issues pop up.
And yes, they are "noticing" because of people opening support cases.
Re: Nanny
They are probably getting support calls from their customers. They don't need telemetry to see the problem.
As far as "nanny" goes... If people call VMware for support that costs them money. I mean, one call makes no difference to them, but lots of calls mean they have to hire more support staff. So they are banning a whole category of support calls, which will save VMware money.
It also gives IT departments a stick to beat the beancounters with: "VMware changed the rules, our old configuration is no longer supported" is a much stronger argument than "I'm worried the SD cards might fail soon". That argument also shifts blame nicely - it's all VMware's fault that they have to spend money and time reconfiguring systems, everyone in the company is blameless. Yes, this paragraph is full of nonsense big company bullsh*t, but that doesn't make it wrong.
Re: Nanny
If people call VMware for support that costs them money.
Do they offer free support? I would think that support costs their customers money or is it just another victim of overselling?
Re: Nanny
Many years ago, you paid annually for "support". I assume it's still the same. So VMware get the same amount of money if you made 50 calls or none. VMware would obviously rather get the money without having to do anything.
So do they sell magical SSDs that don't wear out?
Maybe their customers are not aware of SSDs?
NOooooo....
The entire point of vmware allowing SD cards/USB sticks for boot was to allow HP and IBM to ship systems with the vmware boot image on the internal sd card, prepped and ready to go. The *idea* was that admins would run a proper install once racked and cabled, but folks is lazy and tend to run off the sd card. Basically, getting around the 'you can't sell our software man' legal rider they had in place. Later, vmware would audit the site and find x unregistered, unlicensed installs, and could oracle all over the client.
Fishes, lures, hooks and gaffs.
(And yes, I found over 150 of those when we decided to actually hunt down the underdesk, internal dev, but it works for production systems)
Almost never liked the thought of usb/sd boot
I remember back when ESXi first came out and everyone was touting SD card and usb drive booting. Servers started coming with internal(??) SD card slots and stuff. Company I was at at the time deployed some using USB sticks I think and had failures pretty quick(had a failure within 4-6 months). At that point I realized I really didn't like the thought of the boot device for a $10-30k+ server being reliant upon such a cheap piece of crap for a boot drive.
I looked a few times but could never find reviews or rankings of higher endurance usb drives/sd cards (perhaps that changed in recent years). HP (and probably others too) came out with a dual micro SD(?) USB stick at one point, I inherited 4 servers that ran that, and went through the associated recall (https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c05369827). Add to that as far as I could tell it was not possible to tell the status of the individual SD cards, you'd only know if both failed. Dell has a BOSS(?) card that sits in a PCI slot I think that uses NVMe drives, sounds pretty neat.
I realize it worked fine for many people for many years. Past 10 years all of my hosts have been fibre channel boot from SAN. Except my personal esxi hosts which use local SSD storage.
Does my head in... I've used USB to boot dozens of ESXi for 10+ years... I've never had a single problem. I even have 5 at home running ESXi 7 with zero issues!
Rather dictating they should simply ask, and suggest it has limited support. This all stems from "Two customers had problems, so we're going to screw you all over."
I may look to see if PXE is feasible... I ain't wasting any more money on storage.
Nanny
We are now witnessing boot-related problems more frequently with ESXi 7.x
How exactly are they witnessing it? Through "telemetry"?
The nanny syndrome is creeping in...