VM /ETC

If you attended VMWorld 2007 in San Francisco last year them you should have received a free usb stick with a bootable copy of ESX 3i on it. It was one of the best handouts at the conference in my opinion. Now you can build your own bootable usb stick from the ESX 3i full ISO download.

Hugo from VMWire added a comment to my previous post about the ESX 3i ISO download that instructions for building your own bootable ESX 3i usb stick have been recently posted by a blogger named Knorrhane over at communities.vmware.com. It turns out that Knorrhane’s post is actually a cut and paste from the original message posted by VCPaul and found in the discussion forums at VMware Communities.

The original discussion thread contains several messages about the supportability of ESX 3i and the potential security implications of using usb devices with servers.

You can get these instructions from either link above, or I have cut and pasted them here for posterity:

Requirements:

• 1 GB USB flash drive
• WinImage
• IZArc

Of course you can use your favourite 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
2. Extract INSTALL.TGZ from the root directory of the ISO image using an IZArc
3. Extract /usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2 from INSTALL.TGZ using IZArc
4. Extract VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd from VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2 using IZArc
5. Attach the USB flash drive and make sure you no longer need the data on it
6. Use WinImage to transfer VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd to the USB flash drive
   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-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd
   4. Confirm the warning message
   5. Wait for the transfer to complete
7. Unplug the USB flash drive (Warning: If you forget to unplug the flash drive from the PC you might lose the data on your hard drives the next time you boot!)
8. Attach the USB flash drive to the machine you want to boot (Warning: If ESX Server 3i recognizes local drives, you might lose the data on it, so make sure you don´t need it anymore or unplug all hard drives!)
9. Turn the machine on and make sure the USB flash drive is selected as boot device
10. Watch ESX Server 3i boot
11. Configure
12. Enjoy!

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