AIO Ep4. Installing ESXi on a USB Drive and Using System Disks for Storage

This article mainly introduces the method of installing ESXi onto a USB drive.

Since the motherboard’s SATA controller needs to be passed through to DSM (Synology NAS), ESXi must be installed on a USB drive.

1. During installation, select the USB drive as the target installation disk.

2. Log in to the Web UI, go to Host > Manage > Services, and enable the SSH service.

3. Refer to this guide, with some additional details:

   The guide is designed for larger SSDs. If you’re using a 16GB USB drive, you can partition it as shown below:

   1 2 3 4 5 6

   partedUtil setptbl mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 gpt \ "1 64 204863 C12A7328F81F11D2BA4B00A0C93EC93B 128" \ "5 208896 2306047 EBD0A0A2B9E5443387C068B6B72699C7 0" \ "6 2308096 4405247 EBD0A0A2B9E5443387C068B6B72699C7 0" \ "7 4407296 20037631 4EB2EA3978554790A79EFAE495E21F8D 0" \ "8 20039680 31266782 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0"

   If you’re using a 32GB or 64GB USB drive, use the following partitioning scheme instead:

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   partedUtil setptbl mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 gpt \ "1 64 204863 C12A7328F81F11D2BA4B00A0C93EC93B 128" \ "5 208896 8595455 EBD0A0A2B9E5443387C068B6B72699C7 0" \ "6 8597504 16984063 EBD0A0A2B9E5443387C068B6B72699C7 0" \ "7 16986112 32767999 4EB2EA3978554790A79EFAE495E21F8D 0" \ "8 32770047 X AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0"

   All other steps remain the same as described in the original guide.

   The reason for this adjustment is that with a 16GB USB drive, the default data storage area becomes very small during installation, making the original partitioning scheme unsuitable (it results in very limited usable space). The two partitioning examples above are for reference only—you can customize them as needed. The key idea is to reduce the space allocated to VMFSL and give more room to the VMFS partition.

   Pitfall Alert: Make sure to keep the VMFSL partition! (At least 8GB or more.) If you remove or repurpose it, all configuration changes will be lost after every reboot. I once reformatted the VMFSL partition as a data store, which caused my PCIe passthrough settings to never take effect. It took me a long time to realize the root cause was the missing VMFSL partition.