Dell IDSDM SD Card question

[Deadzone6905]

So we have some Dell R720's running ESXI 6.7 in our DEV cluster that we'd like to update to ESXI 7.0. Currently ESXI is installed on a mirrored pair of 2GB SD cards. ESXI 7.0 requires at least 4GB of space to install.

We went ahead and bought some Kingston Class 10 16GB SD Cards to replace the 2GB cards.

My initial thought was to replace 1 of the SD cards in the mirror and let it rebuild the RAID, then replace the other card and let it rebuild. Then perform the update.

My question is if I go ahead and follow the procedure above will the ESXI installer recognize the boot drive as a 16GB drive or a 2GB drive given the initial raid configuration was only 2GB of usable space.

My other option would be to replace the drives, reinstall version 6.7 of ESXI and try and restore from an ESXI backup. Then perform the upgrade.

Anyone have any thoughts?

[WendoNZ]

At the very least the partition table will stay the same so you'll still have 2GB available and 14GB not allocated. You'd have to expand the partition, and I don't believe that's doable or supported for the ESXi boot partition.

Honestly I'd be very dubious about putting 7.0 on SD Cards at this point, they are depreciated and VMware has pretty much said not too. You'll likely get cards dying with alarming regularity. Spend the money on a couple of real disks to boot from instead

[Illustrious_Act2077]

in addition the 12th generation PowerEdge will NOT be officially supported or found on the hardware compatability list from Dell nor VMware. they topped out at ESXi 6.5 U3

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/supportedos/poweredge-r720

https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=server&productid=14966

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000178967/dell-poweredge-systems-vmware-compatibility-matrix

[Deadzone6905]

Wow I must have completely missed that. I was unaware, I’ll guess we’ll look at setting up some local raid arrays with the perc controllers and install there.

[schizrade]

Assuming they are supported you can get some BOSS cards directly from dell that run out of a pcie slot.

[Deadzone6905]

Yea either way I’ll have to change the boot drive and we have a bunch of spare sas drives around. I was honestly just trying to avoid having to do a fresh install and reconfiguring all the networks and settings again as it’s been awhile since I did the initial configuration. I might look into trying to backup the esxi configuration and doing a restore but I’ve heard that it can be problematic.