ESXi on USB - Part II

I have been working with a test version of ESX 4i, 4.0 U2 on a USB stick. I installed it the USB stick like I documented on my August 4th post. I like it but seeing some problems. For some reason it is slowing down my system. When I benchmark my ESX host it is only getting 5MB/s on disk access for the guests.

Now these guests are either on a single SCSI U320 disk attached to a ServeRaid-6M, or in a RAID 5 config on that same card, and they are behaving poorly.

I believe that somehow the ESX hypervisor is writing to the USB stick and slowing the whole system down. So I am going back to an installable version on a SCSI disk

ESXi on USB

I found this great little tutorial on how to install ESXi onto a USB stick. I know that there are a bunch of ways, but this was fast, simple, and can be done from windows with tools that I already have: WinRAR and WinImage

http://www.vladan.fr/how-to-install-esxi-40-on-usb-memory-key

Give it a shot.

UPDATE: I use this on a dedicated system so I am not concerned with data loss, but from my tests with 4.0 U2 the hypervisor will grab a partition and format it with VMFS.