Comments on: Creating a Bootable ESXi USB Stick on Mac OS X

By: slowe

slowe — Fri, 27 May 2011 14:17:38 +0000

Mike Sims, to my knowledge ESXi is not supported on a MacPro. Unfortunately, I don’t have a 24GB MacPro on which to test it.

By: Mike Sims

Mike Sims — Fri, 27 May 2011 12:09:32 +0000

Has anyone gotten ESXi to actually work on a Mac? And if so, does ESXi on Intel Mac hardware support OSX Guests? Parallels has a bare metal hypervisor that can do this, and my MacPro (late 2008 model) has 24 gigs of ram (at least 15 TB of storage at various levels [eSata, FW800, USB, DROBO Etc.]) and an itch to be the only adult kid in my city to say he can truly run OSX and Windows on the same mac simultaneously AT BARE METAL! (although I guess I give up that coherence nonsense – boo hoo) and it’s BEGGING me to run all guests at a more rudimentary level as I now run OSX Server and Windows 7 under Parallels Desktop and I’m not going to spend $1,000 for a hypervisor just so I can geek out harder than I do now.

By: slowe

slowe — Sat, 21 May 2011 15:26:49 +0000

Thanks, Aaron!

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sat, 21 May 2011 10:37:44 +0000

FYI the VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-xxxx.i386.dd.bz2 file is in the install.tgz file within the ISO.
Extract it using stuffit and the file is under:
install/sbin/usr/lib/vmware/installer/

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 21 May 2010 07:50:51 +0000

Any idea about getting ESXi to work on a Mac? The CD booted on my new Mac Pro, but like another poster above, I’m getting the “failed to load lvmdriver” error. Trying your bzcat/dd to USB flash drive method and I’ll see if that boots. It runs fine in VMWare Fusion, but that kind of defeats the purpose of using ESXi…

By: slowe

slowe — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:56:54 +0000

Johan,

As far as I know, it should work. I’ve never tried it, but it should work. Good luck!

By: Johan

Johan — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:16:04 +0000

Would this method also work for creating any bootable Linux USB stick? I want to use my Mac to make a bootable and persistent Ubuntu stick, but the only methods I’ve found, other than this, assume you’re on Windows.

By: Tom Rowan

Tom Rowan — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:16:12 +0000

I’ve got this working fine. I used my Mac to ‘dd’ the files on the USB Stick. (see here http://rowanidentity.blogspot.com/2009/07/installing-esx4i-on-usb-memory-stick.html). Great.

But the problem is that even on a 4GB stick there is no room for the 4GB VFAT scratch partition. That means that the ESXi host will have to use additional memory in lieu of a scratch partition. (I remember a value of 512MB extra?).

So while it all works fine in a 1GB stick, 8GB or bigger would be optimal. After all an 8GB stick is about £10-£20 depending on quality. As the woman in your life would tell you: Size Matters.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:56:13 +0000

Daniel W,
I tried this but after loading all the files when it tries to boot I get lvmdriver failed to load and it halts.

I am now in the process of following the instructions above. Pushing an hour waiting for bzcat to finish.

By: Daniel W

Daniel W — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 04:54:32 +0000

Things may have changed since your original post .. but you can boot your Mac off of an ESXi installer CD (Hold Down Option key when turning Mac On). The Installer will let you install directly to a USB stick.

Also .. if you ever want to burn an ISO to a USB Stick, go into Disk Utility (Applications / Utilities). Click on a disk and go into the restore tab. You have two text boxes. Drag your ISO into the ‘Source’ box. Drag your USB partition into the ‘Destination’ Box. Click ‘Restore’