"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", guidance on minimum boot device size requirements for upgrades to ESX 9.0

Products

• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

VCF environments may encounter the following error message while running prechecks or upgrading hosts to ESX 9.0 :

/var/log/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-debug.log

"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 YYYY MiB in size."

Environment

VCF 9.0 and above versions.

Cause

The error is displayed because the boot device size is insufficient to support upgrades to ESX 9.0. Systems with non-USB boot device (like HDD, SSD or NVME) of size less than 8 GB will be blocked from upgrading to future ESX major release due to product hardware requirements.

Resolution

• ESX 9.0 requires a boot disk of at least 8 GB of persistent storage such as HDD, SSD, or NVMe. A boot device must not be shared between ESX hosts.
• Please refer to the ESX Hardware Requirements to understand the minimum boot device size requirements for ESX and use a boot device that meets the Hardware requirements.
• Please modify/replace your hardware to match the above requirements to proceed with the upgrade.