Preferably, the SD cards should be replaced with an M.2 or another local persistent device as the standalone boot option.Īdditional information on ESXi System Storage Changes can be found here:Īdditional information for solutions related to this article for ESXi 7.x and Future versions: SD cards can continue to be used for the bootbank partition provided that a separate persistent local device to store the OSDATA partition (32GB minimum, 128GB recommended) is available in the host.
VSphere 7 introduced changes to how the system storage partitions were laid out. VMware strongly advises that you move away completely from using SD card/USB as a boot device option on any future server hardware.
The decision to remove this option came about due to the many issues related to device reliability when SD cards are used as the boot device as reported by vSphere customers.
VMware has announced that starting from the next major vSphere release, SD cards/USB media as a standalone boot device will not be supported. VMware Removes Option For SD Card/USB as a Standalone Boot Device
