I noticed that the Supermicro X9SCL has a USB type-a port right on the motherboard.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C202_C204/X9SCL.cfm
Has anyone used a port like this to boot the core OS and used the physical drives for OpenVZ and KVM containers? I figure a 64GB thumb drive would work. Anyone done this or will a USB thumb drive not stand up too the load? Seems much easier then using a SATA SSD drive but I imagine you still have to find a more durable USB drive.
works great with VMware ESXI, or FreeNAS... neither of those treats the boot device as a read/write file system. FreeNAS does have one master configuration file it updates when you make configuration changes, but no operational data is written to it.
Hmm, my CentOS install is still do some log file writing. Most of the traffic is on /vz though. Wander how much a USB thumb drive can take? Know of any better ones?