Guidance on minimum boot device size requirements for upgrades to future ESXi releases.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

While upgrading the ESXi hosts to ESXi 8.0 Update3, users may encounter the following warning message:
The boot device of the host has a capacity of XXXX MiB. Install or upgrade to future ESXi releases will not be supported on this boot device. Please switch to a boot device that is at least 7629 MiB in size. Refer to KB-96511 for further details

Environment

vSphere ESXi 8.0 Update 3 

Cause

• This article aims to inform the remediation steps for the above warning message.
• The warnings/errors are displayed because the boot device size is insufficient to support upgrades to future ESXi major release.
  Systems with non-USB boot device (like HDD, SSD or NVME) of size less than 8 GB will be blocked from upgrading to future ESXi major release.

Resolution

• Please refer to the Docs Link to understand the minimum boot device size requirements for ESXi and use a boot device that meets the Hardware requirements.
  
  
• ESXi 8.0 requires a boot disk of at least 32 GB of persistent storage such as HDD, SSD, or NVMe. A boot device must not be shared between ESXi hosts.