Spent a lot of time with VMware support after one of our brand new host starting locking up to this bug and it just doesn’t make sense. Im going to be honest Duncan, i don’t get this change. Make sure to follow the requirements around endurance though! They are not too expensive(greenfield deployments), plus they can provide enterprise-grade persistent storage to store all your ESXi related data. Now, I am not going to repeat word for word what is mentioned in the KB, I would just like to urge everyone to read the KB article, and make sure to plan accordingly! Personally, I am a fan of M.2 flash devices for booting. I can be short about it, if you are buying new hardware make sure to have a proper persistent storage device, USB/SD is not the right choice going forward! Why? The volume of reads/writes to and from the OS-DATA partition continues to increase with every release, which means that the lower grade devices will simply wear out faster. On the 16th of September, a KB article was published by VMware, which contains statements around the future of SD/USB devices. It has, however, resulted in a longer debate around whether SD/USB devices should still be used for booting ESXi, and it seems that the jury has reached a verdict.
Those issues have been resolved with the latest patch for 7.0 U2. Most of you reading this probably also knew there was an issue with 7.0 U2, which resulted in USB/SD devices wearing out a lot quicker. We’ve all seen those posts from people about worn-out SD/USB devices, or maybe even experience it ourselves at some point in time.