SD Cards and USB boot no longer supported in ESXi – Easy way to clone to SSD

Recent guidance from VMware notes customers must start thinking about their boot devices with ESXi versions moving forward. VMware is deprecating support of SD Cards and USB drives as “standalone boot devices” moving forward. It means you can’t boot ESXi from these devices as the sole boot device.

Check out the official KB article here:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85685

If you have a VMware home lab or other environment where you are booting from SD Cards or USB devices, there is a handy utility from Alex’s coding playground that allows cloning your ESXi installation from an SD Card or USB device over to an SSD or other device you can mount to your workstation using a USB connection. Take a look at that utility here:

https://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/download/

Check out the blog post where I detail this information on the hardware I used for the clone process, how to setup the software for the clone process to successfully clone over your ESXi installation, and the results that I was able to achieve.

https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2021/09/removal-of-sd-card-usb-esxi-standalone-easy-migration-to-ssd/