Mongoose88

I managed to get this working with ESXi 7.0. I used two USB Flash drives, one to install ESXi on and boot from, the other as a datastore. With 7.0, it will use up to 128GB of the install drive, so you would need something bigger than that to boot and have a datastore on the same disk (SSD or Flash for that matter). By default, datastores on removable storage are not automatically mounted, so you need to enable SSH and login to the vmware console. You will need to run the first command to find the details for your Flash Drive and then run the second command to have vmware pass it thru at boot up. “Selective Disable USB” #esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list enter the Bus#,Dev#,vendorId and productId of the device in the format Bus#:Dev#:vendorId:productId using hexadecimal values esxcli hardware usb passthrough device disable -d 1:3:456:7890 (Example string) I got it working but ultimately decided to use a 120gb SSD drive instead. It was just a more straight forward setup and seemed more dependable considering I wasn’t restricted by drive bays in my setup. Moving the USB drive to a different port or swapping the drive will require running the commands again. I would label the flash drives/USB ports so if removed you won't lose track putting them back. I was afraid that troubleshooting down the road might leave me scrambling to find my notes on this as it was not something many people do. Lastly, I believe there was an issue of not having any local swap/log dump space for ESXi. It will use ramdisk so logs are lost at reboot. Just some things to keep in mind when using this setup.