Hello,
I have read many times that when you install ESXi 5.1 on to flash media it creates a scratch space on a 4GB ramdisk in /tmp/scratch so that the USB drive itself is not used for temporary data to prolong the life of the USB drive. However this does not seem to be my experience and I was wondering if someone can help me confirm that my scratch drive is in fact on a ramdisk or whether it is on the USB thumbdrive. I should mention as well that during installation ESXi did correctly identify the disk type as "flash" and the disk as a "Generic USB drive".
After installation I noticed two things:
1. Logs of user log-in activities do survive a reboot (which I do not believe they should since the ram disk is dissolved upon a reboot)
2. There is no directory with the path /tmp/scratch
Unfortunately I cannot directly identify where the scratch partition is (whether on USB or in RAM) because I do not have an "/etc/fstab" file to look at (though I do under ESXi 5.0 on a hard-disk based install?) and there does not appear to be a "mount" command that I can use to look at existing mounts either.
Can anyone tell me what I can do to verify that the directory used for temporary files is in fact a ramdisk and not on the USB drive itself? Hours of searching have only turned up forum posts and documentation stating unquestionably that the scratch file will use "/tmp/scratch", but that just isn't the case.
Thanks in advance for all of your help.