Boot SSD endurance question ?

[Black Ninja]

I am thinking to install esxi 5.5 on small mirrored SSD's as boot drive (hardware raid)with nothing else on it but the esxi itself. Can somebody give me an idea how many GB ESXI will write on the boot drive for a year aprox.

I am trying to size the proper SSD for the endurance that will be needed for ESXI writes. I won't use the drive for VMs or anything else but as boot drive, any ideas how much writes will accumulate aprox. ?

Thanks

 

[Mlovelace]

The recommended boot volume minimum size is 5GB.

ESXi loads into memory on boot and runs in memory, the only thing that gets written to the boot volume (assuming the boot volume isn't a USB drive) are host config changes and logs. You would be much better off spending money on a better SSD to use as a datastore and/or Host cache device, and installing ESXi on a USB thumb drive. Keep a current backup of the ESXi config and if the USB thumb drive dies, install on a new one and upload the config, you'll be backup inside of 5 min.

 

[Black Ninja]

ESXi loads into memory on boot and runs in memory, the only thing that gets written to the boot volume (assuming the boot volume isn't a USB drive) are host config changes and logs.

I know that, but still want to know how much data ?

You would be much better off spending money on a better SSD to use as a datastore and/or Host cache device, and installing ESXi on a USB thumb drive.

Thanks for the advice but no usb. ESXI host will be all flash anyways, perhaps Intel S3500 120GB for boot and Intel S3610 or S3700 400Gb-800Gb for VMs, so host cache don't make any sense for me on all flash storage. The system need to stay up on disk failure and be up on disk replacement, re-install and usb is way out of the question.