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Does ESXi keep going if I pull the boot media out?

My server has an internal USB port but I was scared to take the lid off so I installed VMware ESXi on a USB stick plugged into an external USB port instead.

Will it keep going until rebooted if someone pulls the USB stick out? If not then why not?

(It's a theoretical server by the way so don't ask me about versions)
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Andy,

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME

Rather than you have rely on urban legends and myth, if this is true, as we've been working late in the Lab today, found my trusty Flip Camera, and recorded this for you. This is a DL380G4, ESXi 4.0, and so you can see the disk reads, we've used a Sandisk 4GB USB flash drive with a flash orange beacon light, at the first stage of the ESXi boot process, at the Black and White screen, the USB is used to read the contents into memory, at the Yellow and Black stage the USB flash drive can be removed, as drivers and loaded from memory, you can see in the video the flash drive has been removed at yellow and black stages, and later it's visible in my hand, in front of the screen, and later enter configuration options!

Video here

Have fun

Andy
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So are Dell lying on page 4 of http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/pedge_m910_hp_proliant.pdf ?

"Within 5 minutes of removing the non-redundant USB key hosting the hypervisor on ProLiant BL685c G7, the host stopped responding and all contact with its virtual machines was lost"
Andy, interesting statement to have made in a document, I have the video evidence,but they dont suggest under what conditions this was tested, if they were chaging configuration, install VMware Tools.

I would like to have seen a video from them to prove this. I wonder why also this Technical Document is March 2011, and they've used ESXi 4.0? (and not at least ESXi 4.1)

Also most Administrators I know, make backups of the USB/SD card, for easy DR!
Well, it is a Dell comparison, it claims that the Dell has more onboard Ethernet ports than the HP but omits to mention the HP ones are 10Gb.

Would appreciate if you can carry on with your test for a reasonable length of time and check the VMs still respond.
Just bringing online, will vMotion some test VMs, and remove....(later)
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Everything is fine with the host and host is responding.
Yeah - I figure dell did some operation like the two I mentioned above to cause the hp system to fail -  most likely some configuration change.

However, the idea of mirrored USB/SD media is appealing for the hypervisor...
Pity it PSODs if you try to make a change, hopefully they can fix this and give a warning about the write failure and advising you to vMotion the VMs to another host.
What configuration change would you like me to make, still running here....
Anything you can think of that's likely to write to the stick such as adding another virtual switch.
No Network Config doesn't break it.

Can update or patch, because it's already patched.

Installing VMware Tools, does cause the Virtual Machine, that tools is trying to be installed on to hang.

until it timesout with, and VM recovers.

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