Hello everyone,
I'm in the process of setting up my homelab, and wanted to try using ESXI as my hypervisor. I have recently acquired a DELL PE R710 that I will be using as my virtualization server, and it has an internal USB slot available just for the ESXI use.

I've been googling and duck-ducking around the last week and can't figure out if I can save the configurations I make to the USB drive. I'm using a 16gb USB drive for this ESXI hypervisor and I've read that if I don't save my configurations, I'll have to start from scratch if the server is powered off for any reason.

Can I use the extra 8gb+ of storage on this USB drive to save my configurations so that they will be available should I restart this server?

Hoping this makes some sense.....

Thanks.

I guess I need more information. Do you want to install to this usb and run from it or are you using the USB as a machine or storage?

The Dell PE R710 has a USB slot inside the case, and from what I've read, this is so that you can use a USB drive to run the ESXI hypervisor from instead of using one of the hard drives.

What I'm wanting to do is to install ESXI onto this 16gb USB drive, use this drive as the OS, and save any configurations I make for VM's, datastores, ect onto this USB drive instead of using any of the hard drives as these will be for storing the actual VM's and such.

Hopefully this helps?

Many boards have an internal usb. Many are not USB 3 and you'd suffer a speed issue I'd think. A usb no matter where it resides on the system is generally a bootable location for some resource. Some add on cards may have issues.

I haven't played with esxi in a while. At one time it was quite strict in it's hardware requirements. I'd suspect that that or some other bare metal hypervisor could be installed to this usb. Proxmox should work if esxi complains.

For most modern systems and most modern distro's a usb is a hard drive. You install to it as if it were a hard drive and you select it from bios as a hard drive.

Thank you all for these answers as these have provided the info I needed to make this work. Ive managed to get ESXI 6.0 installed and working on my USB drive which does work, albeit a bit slow on startup but it does work as expected once loaded and running. All my VM's on this USB drive run quick and speedy.....

Thanks again.

Thanks for the update and solution.