Extending an ESXi diagnostic core dump partition on a vSAN 6.5 node

This is something very interesting which gained support with the release of vSAN 6.5. It will be of interest to those customers who boot their ESXi hosts from USB/SD devices, and also have vSAN configured. One long-standing restriction with this configuration was the inability to boot from USB/SD when the amount of memory in the host is over 512GB. This is because we could not guarantee that the memory dump would fit in the pre-sized core dump partition. Well, now we have the ability to resize the core dump partition, even when it resides on a USB/SD device. The guidance…

Handling VSAN trace files when ESXi boots from a flash device

I’ve been involved in a few conversations recently regarding how VSAN trace files are handled when the ESXi host that is participating in a VSAN cluster boots from a flash device. I already did a post about some of these considerations in the past, but focused mostly on USB/SD. However SATADOM was not included in this discussion, as we did not initially support SATADOM in VSAN 5.5, and only announced SATADOM support for VSAN 6.0. It seems that there are some different behaviors that need to be taken into account between the various flash boot devices, which is why I…

VSAN considerations when booting from USB/SD

This is a conversation that comes up time and time again. It’s really got to do with the following considerations when booting an ESXi host that is participating in VSAN from an SD/USB device:: What should I do for persisting the vmkernel logs? What should I do about persisting the VSAN trace files? What should I do for capturing core dumps (PSOD)?