Why doesn’t the Internal USB port boot ESXi 6 on the Microserver Gen8

hp-proliantusb-bootvmware-esxi

I'm trying to run ESXi 6 off the Internal USB 2.0 port on a HP Microserver Gen8. No matter what I try it will not make any attempt to boot the internal USB to load the hypervisor.

I installed ESXi 6 with the customised ProLiant HP image (Jan 2016). The steps I took to do this was burn the ISO to a CD and installed it to a 8 GB Transcend while it was plugged into the internal USB slot of the Microserver Gen8. I pulled all SATA drives before installing. The ESXi setup detected the USB drive no problem and installed without an issues. Upon rebooting it doesn't boot from it at all.

I checked my BIOS and all the USB related options appear to be correct:

  • USB Enabled – Enabled
  • USB Boot Support – Enabled
  • Main Boot order – USB DriveKey is set to first priority
  • Internal drives boot priority – USB DriveKey first
  • USB Enumeration – Enabled

To confirm the USB stick is working I pulled it out of the Microserver Gen8 and booted it on a laptop, which booted no problem.

I had the same problem with another USB drive but thought it might just be bad luck for compatibility, however two USB drives doing the same thing seems a little bit suspect.

What am I missing that's preventing the USB drive from booting on the Microserver Gen8 when using the internal port?

Best Answer

For your actual problem:

Format your USB with MBR and not GPT partitions. That will fix this issue...

Hit Shift-O during installation and add formatwithmbr:

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My rant...

See: HP Proliant Microserver Gen8: OS on a Micro SD or USB drive a good idea?

Something many people don't understand about HP ProLiant servers is that HP Smart Array controllers are capable of having multiple "Logical Drives" on the same physical "Array".

This means that you can take a group of disks and separate them into two or more volumes. E.g. 6 x 300GB disks can be 1 x 100GB volume for an operating system and 800GB for data. This is a valuable feature.

So for the example of the particular HP MicroServer in this question, you have a compact server with four drive bays...

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The goal is to run VMware ESXi and the OP wants to install it on a USB key. Running VMware on a USB or SD card when you're not operating in a clustered environment with shared storage is a bad idea. Failure of your USB/SD device is a pain to deal with.

ESXi does not require much space, so an easy approach for this server type is to create a 16GB logical drive to house ESXi, then allocate the rest to your VM storage. This way, you have RAID protection for VMware and your data storage without wasting disk space.

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