ESXi boot from XHCI?

[destrekor]

Skylake appears to be completely xHCI. I'm kind of undecided between an E3-1230 v5 and a Xeon D-1528 or another Xeon D platform for my future ESXi build.

Honestly I tried searching but my google-fu must be a little rusty this evening. Can you boot ESXi on a USB port that only supports xHCI?

 

[Bubbaleone]

This VMware knowledge base article should shed a little light your way:

USB support in ESXi/ESX 4.1, ESXi 5.x, and ESXi 6.0 (1022290)

 

[destrekor]

This VMware knowledge base article should shed a little light your way:

USB support in ESXi/ESX 4.1, ESXi 5.x, and ESXi 6.0 (1022290)

Doesn't say anything about booting into ESXi from USB, that's just about pass-through to guests.

 

[PingSpike]

I believe I've done this with an AMD board (separate controllers for USB2 and 3 in that case) but I think I've booted off the 3. I could try tonight as I have a test machine with ESXi on a flash drive.

I'd actually be surprised if it couldn't be made to work. Flash drive installs are common, ESXi now supports USB3 device passthrough even and as you said the single controller is going to be more common.

 

[Dahak]

What he is asking is all previous systems before skylake have the ehci(usb2.0) controller to fall back on where as in skylake systems only have the new xhci(usb3.0) controller and no real fallback.

This is similar to trying to boot and install from Win7 without adding the usb3 drives to the install media.

I cant seem to find that answer either

 

[PingSpike]

So, I moved the USB to a USB3.0 port on the motherboard and it booted up fine. Not exactly the same thing but a pretty good sign I think.