Tested with Winimage v8.50, (you will have to use the licensed professional version for the feature "Create Virtual Harddisk image from physical drive" to work) I think there are other (free) imaging tools like DD on linux or Windows 7 / W2K8R2 Powershell scripts capable of cloning usb-partitions but you have to try, for me Winimage is the easiest solution.Vmk vs vmnic Very simple deployment. With this image you will be able to "Restore Virtual Harddisk image on physical drive" and deploy additional usb-sticks within 5 minutes compared with 15 to 20 minutes for an normal installation, like the solution with the imagedd with v4.x. 5 thoughts on Making a Bootable ESXi USB Drive Sycrid on 8 at 03:11 said: Extremely helpful, you’ve just saved me the time of trying to build this USB stick with every boot program I have, and your solution works.
1 x VMware ESX(i) ISO image either on CD or in file format. Before diving in to cover the steps necessary to create a bootable UFD with VMware ESXi on it from your Apple computer, there are a few requirements: Apple workstation (running OS X 10.7.5 or. b) Select VMware ESXi 6.x as a guest operating system. a) Select the installer ISO disk image of your VMware ESXi distribution. In the new VM creation wizard, define the necessary parameters. A VM must have a USB controller and a virtual CD/DVD drive (they are created by default). dd ifesxi-boot-part of/dev/sdk4 3000+0 records in 3000+0 records out 1536000 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 1.31462 seconds, 1.2 MB/s sync. Create a VM in VMware Workstation (File > New virtual machine). The Machine SID Duplication Myth (and Why Sysprep. Advanced Configuration options for VMware High Ava. Formatting a USB Flash Drive to Boot the ESXi 5.0.
and Winimage will restore it without errors to another usb-stick! How to create a bootable VMware ESXi 3.5 & 4.0 (vSphere) USB pen drive. Use dd to write the saved boot partition to flash. Deploying ESXi 5.0 using the Scripted Install feature Create a bootable VMware ESXi 5 USB stick in Windo. in esxi 5.5 were old drivers droped, this is my procedure for creating a bootable flashdrive with the old drivers for nic and raid. Step 4) Put the ESXi host in maintenance mode. Step 3) Connect to the ESXi server through the VI client you wish to inject the NIC drivers into. Step 2) Install the VMware vSphere Command-Line Interface.
Winimage will NOT open the created image after creation because it contains non-NTFS/FAT Partitions and will report an error, but this is no problem because the image is o.k. For easy reference follows a step by step How To: Step 1) Download the VMware vSphere Command-Line Interface from the VMware website. You can use the option "Create Dynamically Expanding Virtual Hard Disk" (the resulting image will then be only 1.5 GB instead 4 GB if you used an 4 GB usb-stick) Then use Winimage to create an "Virtual Harddisk image from physical drive" of your usb-stick. IMPORTANT: Dont boot the server/VM after the installation from the newly installed usb-stick and do NO CONFIGURATIONS like vswitches or portgroups at all!!! (othewise you will eventually copy virtual MAC addresses created and thats no good idea) You will have to do a normal installation of ESXi v5.0.0 (on hardware or workstation-virtual machine) only one time to real, physical usb-stick. I've found a way very similar to the solution for v4.x (with the imagedd), except you will have to create your usb-stick-image yourself instead of extracting it from the installation media.