Install ESX from a USB drive
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
unfortunately no success here, i might try this with a USB DVD drive
Very well detailed instructions! one issue I am having with an old GB-7007 is changing the boot device.. only the raid and the network card show up; no USB device. Elsewhere in the BIOS it does say all USB are enabled… and I’ve placed a bootable (Ubuntu 32) USB drive in there.. it just doesn’t seem to see it. Any clue? Thanks for the good info on unlocking the bios BTW!
Hi Miles, Can you try from a USB CD drive?
I couldn’t get this to work using ESX 5.0.0 and syslinux 4.0.4 using the above method however when I just burnt the ESX iso to a cd it installed fine (so far… its on 10%)