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No suitable disk was found when upgrading to ESXi 6.5 on USB?

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I got a question from my buddy Paudie O'Riordan this morning where he was noticing a strange issue while trying to upgrade his ESXi hosts from 6.0 to 6.5 (all on the VMware HCL). Like many of our customers, he runs ESXi on USB device and when he attempted to upgrade using ESXi Scripted Install (Go Automation!), he was surprised to find that his USB device was not being detected.


Interestingly, I had literally just finished answering a similar question on our internal Socialcast forum and I had wondered if Paudie was also seeing the same problem. The issue looks to be related to the new USB Native Driver (vmkusb) that was introduced in ESXi 6.5 where is it is unable to claim the specific USB device.

Although you can disable the USB Native Driver and fall back to the legacy driver as mentioned in this VMware KB 2147650, but because this is happening during the installation/upgrade process, it can get a bit tricky.

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Copying files from a USB (FAT32 or NTFS) device to ESXi

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It is not uncommon, especially in troubleshooting scenarios where you might find yourself needing to transfer files to or from an ESXi host using a USB device as it may not be reachable on the network. Another common case for directly attaching a USB device to an ESXi host is to transfer a large amount of Virtual Machines that were exported from another system and rather than streaming the content from your desktop, you may want to connect it directly to ESXi host. In fact, I had this very use case when I was a customer after we had acquired a company and needed to transfer their assets to our infrastructure. The IT admins just copied everything onto a USB device and then shipped us the drive for processing.

Historically, it was understood that ESXi could only access a USB device (requires disabling the USB arbitrator service) if it contains a FAT16 partition which are then automatically mounted under the /vmfs/volumes/ path. The biggest issue with FAT16 is that the size of the partition has to be <=2GB which severely limits its use for larger files. Another alternative that came up in recent years years is that you could run VMFS on a USB device, but that obviously would require you to format the USB device with VMFS and it would only be readable between ESXi hosts. If you were looking for something more generic like FAT32 which supports a larger partition size, it was assumed this was not possible, at least I was under that impression.

It was only recently as part of a project I had been working on where I was re-visiting this topic that I had discovered that other partition types such as FAT32 and even NTFS from a USB device could actually be accessed by ESXi 6.x. The assumption that I and probably others had made was that just because the partitions were not visible or mounted by ESXi, it does not mean the underlying USB device would also not be accessible. To access a FAT32 partition from a USB device in ESXi, you can use the mcopy utility from the ESXi Shell and for accessing an NTFS partition from a USB device in ESXi, you can use ntfscat utility. It actually took me some trial/error to get the correct syntax, but you can see how to use the utilities below.

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Functional USB-C Ethernet Adapter for ESXi 5.5, 6.0 & 6.5

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While attending an offsite this week, there were some discussions amongst my colleagues about their new Apple Mac Pro and its USB-C only ports. The discussion was completely unrelated to work, however that did get me thinking about the USB-C peripheral market and specifically their ethernet adapters. While searching online, I came across several new USB-C to gigabit ethernet adapters that were now available and one in particular that was very interesting, was the Plugable USB-C to 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN Network Adapter. What caught my eye about this specific network adapter was that it uses the exact same ASIX AX88179 driver as my USB 3.0 to Ethernet Adapter ESXi VIBs were built off of! There was a good chance this might just work.


As you can probably guess, I was pretty excited and quickly ordered one of the Plugable USB-C Ethernet Adapters. The next challenge was getting access to a system that has a USB-C port. After asking around, I finally got my hands on a Dell XPS 13 which has a USB-C port that I could use for a few days. Funny enough, the Dell laptop only has USB 3.0 and USB-C ports, so the first challenge was to disable Secure Boot since I had built a custom ESXi 6.5 image that included my USB 3.0 Ethernet Adapter VIB. Below are the ESXi VIBs or offline bundles that will be required for this solution.

UPDATE (02/12/19) - A new VMware Native Driver for USB-based NICs has just been released, please use this driver going forward.

Please see this blog post for more detailed instructions on installing the VIB as well as accessing the vusbX pNIC.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk.

Once I got ESXi up and running, I was disappointed to see that the USB-C device was not being detected. I had tried a few more things but nothing worked and I decided to sleep on it. The next morning, I realize maybe there was some additional settings that needed to be tweaked in the BIOS. With a bit of trial/error, I found out that you needed to enable the "Thunderbolt Boot Support" which apparently is disabled by default, at least on this Dell system. Below is a screenshot of the BIOS USB/Thunderbolt Settings and this was the only change required from the system defaults.


Once I rebooted, I immediately saw the link up on the USB-C device while ESXi was starting up 😀

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