How To: Create Your Own Bootable ESX 3i USB Stick

For our work we do a lot of testing, and a very good solution is using VMware. But VMware workstation is making our machine slow because we also start a guest system.

To overcome this I was searching for a solution to load ESX server on my machine This didn't work because ESX is meant to be used on a server, and my machine was not compatible. ESX just wants to use SCSI disks.

There is another solution: ESXI. Instead of making a lot of trouble to get this installed, I created a bootable ESXI-USB stick.
let's see how to do this:

Requirements:

• 1 GB USB flash drive
• WinImage (www.winimage.com)
• Winzip or winrar.

You can also use your own favorite tools and larger USB flash drives, but 1 GB is enough space for the boot image.

Perform the following steps to create a bootable ESX Server 3i USB flash drive:

1. Download ESX Server 3i Installable ISO. This can be found on the website of VMware, www.VMware.com/products/esxi.
2. 2: Mount the ISO image with daemon tools, or extract it with your favorite unzipper.
3. Extract INSTALL.TGZ from the root directory of the ISO image using the unzipper.
4. Extract /usr/lib/VMware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-xxxxx.i386.dd.bz2 from INSTALL.TGZ using the unzipper
5. Extract VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-xxxxx.i386.dd from VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-xxxxx.i386.dd.bz2 using the unzipper
6. Attach the USB flash drive and make sure you no longer need the data on it.
7. Use WinImage to transfer VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-xxxxx.i386.dd to the USB flash drive.

   This can be done by using the steps below:

   1. Disk-> Restore Virtual Hard Disk image on physical drive...
   2. Select the USB flash drive (Warning: If you select the wrong disk you will lose data!)
   3. Select the image file VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-xxxxx.i386.dd
   4. Confirm the warning message
   5. Wait for the transfer to complete (this task can be up to 20 minutes)
8. Unplug the USB flash drive (Warning: Unplug it first before removing it from the machine!)
9. Attach the USB flash drive to the machine you want to boot (Warning: If ESX Server 3i recognizes local drives, there is a slight possibility you loose data!)
10. Turn the machine on and make sure the USB flash drive is selected as boot device
11. Watch ESX Server 3i boot
12. Configure ESXI. Most important is that you give it a IP address. After you have give it a IP address, you can connect to the stick with a virtual infrastructure client. This will give you all the benefits of the virtual infrastructure to build virtual machines or to mount existing virtual machines into the inventory.

NOTE: ESXI uses only some particular network cards, and the stick will not work on every machine. ESXI uses a kind of a unidriver that will load the driver. This behavior can be seen when you start the stick, and the IP address is 0.0.0.0. If you then go to configure, and you press the F2 button, you will not be able to configure anything. If you encounter this problem you can easily overcome this by inserting a standard intel network card.

When you have VMware Workstation 6, and you wish to use the VM's you build in VMware Workstation, make sure you make the VM's ESX compatible. The standard VMware Workstation 6 Virtual machines are not compatible.

Now you have a working VMware environment with all kinds of virtual machines. This will enable you to do various tasks with one computer.
I hope you enjoy this trick.

Regards
Erik Westhovens