VMware VS4-ENT-PL-A - vSphere Enterprise Plus Setup Manual page 15

Software Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). See
n
on page 136.
ESXi Booting Requirements
vSphere 5.5 supports booting ESXi hosts from the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With UEFI
you can boot systems from hard drives, CD-ROM drives, or USB media. Network booting or provisioning
with VMware Auto Deploy requires the legacy BIOS firmware and is not available with UEFI.
ESXi can boot from a disk larger than 2TB provided that the system firmware and the firmware on any add-
in card that you are using support it. See the vendor documentation.
N Changing the boot type from legacy BIOS to UEFI after you install ESXi 5.5 might cause the host to
OTE
fail to boot. In this case, the host displays an error message similar to:
the host boot type between legacy BIOS and UEFI is not supported after you install ESXi 5.5.
Storage Requirements for ESXi 5.5 Installation
Installing ESXi 5.5 requires a boot device that is a minimum of 1GB in size. When booting from a local disk
or SAN/iSCSI LUN, a 5.2GB disk is required to allow for the creation of the VMFS volume and a 4GB scratch
partition on the boot device. If a smaller disk or LUN is used, the installer will attempt to allocate a scratch
region on a separate local disk. If a local disk cannot be found the scratch partition,
on the ESXi host ramdisk, linked to
LUN. For best performance and memory optimization, VMware recommends that you do not
leave on the ESXi host ramdisk.
/scratch
To reconfigure
/scratch
Due to the I/O sensitivity of USB and SD devices the installer does not create a scratch partition on these
devices. As such, there is no tangible benefit to using large USB/SD devices as ESXi uses only the first 1GB.
When installing on USB or SD devices, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available local
disk or datastore. If no local disk or datastore is found,
reconfigure
/scratch
In Auto Deploy installations, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available local disk or
datastore. If no local disk or datastore is found
reconfigure /scratch to use a persistent datastore following the installation.
For environments that boot from a SAN or use Auto Deploy, it is not necessary to allocate a separate LUN
for each ESXi host. You can co-locate the scratch regions for many ESXi hosts onto a single LUN. The
number of hosts assigned to any single LUN should be weighed against the LUN size and the I/O behavior
of the virtual machines.
Recommendation for Enhanced ESXi Performance
To enhance performance, install ESXi on a robust system with more RAM than the minimum required and
with multiple physical disks.
For ESXi system requirements, see
papers on vSphere 5 performance at http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/cat/91,203,96.
VMware, Inc.
/tmp/scratch
, see "Set the Scratch Partition from the vSphere Web Client,"
to use a persistent datastore following the installation.
/scratch
"ESXi Hardware Requirements,"
"Installing and Booting ESXi with Software FCoE,"
Not a VMware boot bank
. You can reconfigure
/scratch
is placed on the ramdisk. You should
/scratch
is placed on ramdisk. You should
on page 13. See also the technical
Chapter 2 System Requirements
. Changing
, will be located
/scratch
to use a separate disk or
on page 260.
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