Long boot times for hosts with a large number of datastores

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
Booting of the hosts with Large number of vmfs (512 or 1k Volumes) volumes mounted may take an extended time.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Cause

When the ESXi host boots up, the system attempts to find a suitable partition on a local disk to create the scratch partition. With a large number of volumes or LUNs, the ESXi host will require longer to boot searching for a suitable partition for configuring scratch partition.

Resolution

To reduce the boot time of the host, configure scratch partition manually For more information, see Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 8.x/7.x/6.x.