During VMworld US, I had the opportunity to speak with several customers to learn about their VMware environment and some of the challenges they were facing. In some scenarios, I was able to offer a solution or a different way of solving the problem. For others, it was primarily feedback on how we can better improve some of our capabilities/features or specific feature requests they would like to see get added.
One interesting challenge that arose from a class of customers who manages hundreds of remote sites is the ability fully automate the provisioning of an ESXi host as well as set of Virtual Machines as part of the initial deployment. The provisioning is all done through Kickstart (unattended installation of ESXi) and usually from a USB device but it could also be from a custom ISO. One ask that kept coming up was the support for larger USB key support within ESXi so that it could be used to include additional payload.
As some of you may or may not know, ESXi can only access USB devices within the ESXi Shell formatted using the FAT16 filesystem which allows for a maximum file size of 2GB for each partition. However, this limitation is only for the ESXi Shell itself and for the size of the ESXi installation media, this is more than sufficient. If you wish to leverage larger USB keys which has increased significantly in recent years from 32GB, 64GB and even 128GB, you can directly pass that into any guest OS through the USB Arbitrator Service (enabled by default) and there you will be able to consume the entire capacity of the USB device. The challenge is how do you go about bootstrapping ESXi as well as the initial set of Virtual Machines with these limitations and completely automated using an ESXi Kickstart?