I am currently building a lab environment which if all goes well will soom consist of a single Dell PowerEdge machine with a 10 GBE card connected to a 10 GBE Switch to which is connected a NAS with sufficient storage.
The PowerEdge has no local storage to speak of - only 2 SSD's which I am intended to put in the NAS as SSD Cache.
The PowerEdge will boot to ESXi 6.7U3 from USB thumb drive.
Wondering whether I need to:
a) Have at least a bit of (redundant) local storage for the VMX files of the VM's
b) Have local storage to hold the ESSXi logs. Rather reads and no writes so as to conserve as long as possible the thumb drive
c) If I do at some point get a second ESXi host where do the vmx files need to be to get vMotion configured easily
Any advice or best practices appreciated ... this is not my field exactly.
Once you have USB for the system to boot up (you can boot up also using PXE from the network ;-) ) and shared storage sufficient for required VMs you don't need any other local storage...
a) VMX file can be in theory anywhere but it is usually kept with other VM files so on shared storage.
b) it is up to you if you want to keep the logs (even only "runtime" logs is the option) but it can be also collected out of the box.
c) VMX have to be available :-) - once it is with other VM files on shared storage visible from both ESXi hosts it is OK