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

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’

By: Alex W.

Alex W. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:49:48 +0000

THX M8. I have been banging my head to the wall almost the past hour because I could not make it work. The first time since years of being heavy Mac User I was getting frustrated !

By the way, what in the whole world are you needing G2s ! for. I already binned 12*380G3, fully equipped ! Yesterday I got 7*380G6 ! (2 CPU, 8*146G 15K SAS, 54G DDR3 10600) MUUUUHHHHAAA HHAAAA HA! Such Sexy devices ;D

By: Casey

Casey — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:45:45 +0000

Thanks for this…. it was the second time I wanted to do this, and the second time that googling brought me here (after a number of other places that didn’t give me the answer!) This still works with ESXi 4.0.0, but you have to look inside the “image.tgz” file to find the dd.bz2 file you need.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:02:39 +0000

Hey Scott - is it possible to load dos to the usb stick and boot to it. I now have 4 hypervisor volumes, and bit confused where to go now.
Thanks for great post

By: slowe

slowe — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:08:56 +0000

Rob, I’d estimate about 45 minutes or so–much longer than I expected. However, it’s been a while so my memory may be incorrect. Thanks for reading and commenting!

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:35:55 +0000

Hey Scott, Do you remember how long this took to complete for the bzcat/dd operation?

By: Charles Francis

Charles Francis — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:53:11 +0000

Scott,
This may be a dumb question, but have you done or thought about doing an article on people who want to build an ESXi server at home with backups, etc?

By: Joe the System Administrator

Joe the System Administrator — Sun, 24 May 2009 16:57:23 +0000

Indeed if you attempted to assert this procedure leveraging ESXi Update 4, you might well be flabbergasted to notate that the VMware-VMvisor file is conspicuously in absence!

If your reaction was like mine (“Good grief darling, there is no love with this procedure!”); do not fret, there is a solution to be foretold!

All one has to do is extract the VMware-VMvisor file from the install.tgz file, and once such extraction has become occurrent in the absence of anomalous behavior, the pronouncement of the above entitled procedure will ostensibly function absent appreciable complication or issue.

Moreover, it is instructive that the VMware-VMvisor file when bunzip’ed is about 750MB, thus a thumb drive with a capacity of less than 1GB would not be useful for this exercise.

Good Luck!