I have few ESXi (vSphere) servers running from USB sticks. As USB sticks are not very reliable I would like to prepare myself for those USB devices failure. Sure I could just made configuration backup with vicfg-cfgbackup and in case of any USB failure just reinstall ESXi on new USB stick and restore configuration. A much better option (in term of restoration time) is preparing in advance spare USB sticks with installed ESXi - either by doing clean install on spare USB pendrive and restoring configuration or by just cloning original USB boot pendrive. Both methods requires to temporarily shutdown an ESXi host, which is not an option in my case. So I would like to clone USB pendrive using dd command issued from within ESXi shell (without any down time). The problem is I could not find/identify device name representing my USB boot device.
Could anyone give me some advice in this regard? elk
