Persistent storage warnings when booting ESXi from SD-Card/USB devices.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The purpose of this article is to document the warnings introduced in vSphere 7.0 U3 for systems operating with an deprecated configuration.

Please refer to KB 85685 for further details and information

Symptoms:
The following vSphere errors or warnings are observed when ESXi Host boots from SD-Card/USB devices without the availability of a local persistent storage device:

VOB messages:
 * esx.problem.osdata.usb.nopersist.firstboot

- "Secondary persistent device not found. Please move installation to persistent storage as support for SD-Card/USB only configuration is being deprecated."

 * esx.problem.osdata.usb.nopersist.boot

- "Please add a secondary persistent device. Support for SD-Card/USB only configuration is being deprecated."

 * esx.problem.scratch.on.usb

- "Scratch is configured to SD-Card/USB device. This may result in system failure. Please add a secondary persistent device."

The ESXi host could potentially lose data or fail to boot without a local persistent storage device.

For more information about VOB messages, see Using the VMkernel Observations for Creating Alarms 

Environment

VMware vSphere 7.0.x

Cause

ESXi requires local persistent storage for operating system use, to store system state, configuration, logs, and live data.
Please refer to KB 85685 for further details and information

Resolution

To fix this issue you can apply one (only) of the below solutions:

• Install to a non-USB/SD-Card device.

OR

• Add a persistent storage device to the system and set autoPartition=TRUE to allow initializing it with an ESX-OSData partition. 

For more information, see New Kernel options available on ESXi 7.0

After applying one of the mentioned resolutions, you need to ensure scratch is configured to a reliable filesystem. For more information, see Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 7.x/6.x/5.x/4.x