ESXi won't save config after reboot

[Skirge01]

I've been dealing with this problem for over a year now and every so often I feel the urge to try and figure it out again. Maybe someone around these parts will have an idea how to fix it.

I boot (free) ESXi 5.0 from a USB flash drive. When I do a fresh install of ESXi (as opposed to an upgrade) and the hypervisor comes up the first time, I can make all kinds of changes, reboot, and things are as expected. However, any further changes made to ESXi itself will be lost on subsequent reboots. For example, if I add a new VM, it will need to be added back to inventory every time I reboot. ESXi stays in the same state it was in immediately after that first reboot. Guest OS's run and store their settings normally. It's everything outside the guest OS which is lost upon reboot.

I'm a Linux novice and its command line usage is pretty foreign to me, but, based on something I found elsewhere about the flash drive possibly being read only, I opened the shell via the console and ran /sbin/backup.sh 0 /bootbank/ and saw that state.tgz appears to get updated (the date changes for the file). From what I've read, that would appear to indicate that the flash drive is not read only.

This happens with multiple flash drives and all versions of ESXi I've tried: 5.0, 5.0U1, 5.0U2, 5.1, and 5.5.

Anyone have some ideas?

[nycjoe]

I think flash drives drivers don't actually commit changes unless explicitly told to do so, in order to prolong their short lives. Try issuing the 'sync' command after making your changes (that should work on Linux - I'm not sure about esxi). It's basically the equivalent of 'now safe to remove your hardware' on windows.

[Skirge01]

I suppose that's worth a shot, but you would think that something like ESXi would be set up to issue a command like that after a change is made or, at the very least, when the system is shutting down or rebooting. I know companies run ESXi off flash drives and I have to imagine that this is not happening to them.

[nycjoe]

You can also add the sync option to the file system mount file (basically add a ",sync" to the options column in /etc/fstab), and all updates would be immediately synced, but I think you'd be surprised how short the life of a flash drive can be.

Regarding your enterprise comment - vmware actually keeps functionality on the actual esxi host to a bare minimum in order to influence users to go with a paid product. Other than setting up connectivity, nothing else is configured on the esxi host - everything else is done in vcenter.