Last week I was trying to repurpose an old Google Appliance for a development ESX server. Since the Google appliance was essentially a Dell PowerEdge 2950 it had dual 2.33 GHz Xeons, 16Gb memory and six 250Gb drives.
Unfortunately the system didn’t come with a CD drive so the next easiest installation was going to be from a USB thumb drive.
If you’re keen to install ESX from a USB thumb drive, you’ll need:
- A USB thumb drive, I used a 1Gb Lexar
- An ESX iso, I used VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.0.0-164009.x86_64.iso
- The latest version of syslinux (I used 3.82)
With those bits in hand, do the following.
- Format the USB drive with a FAT32 filesystem
- Use something like 7-Zip to extract the ISO to your USB thumb drive
- Download the latest syslinux ZIP file and extract it somewhere
- From the “syslinux\win” directory run
syslinux.exe -s -m -f -a h:Where h: is the letter your USB thumb drive is assigned - Rename the hidden file isolinux.cfg on your USB thumb drive to syslinux.cfg
- Safely Remove your USB thumb drive and install ESX
