Install VMware vSphere 4 on a USB Stick
Posted by Colin Bodor on Jun 08, 2009.
VMware vSphere 4 (AKA ESX and ESXi) came out not too long ago with all sorts of new features. I won't go into detail about what's new but visiting the vmware site is a good start. For those of us who have enjoyed running ESXi 3.5x on a USB stick (and those soon to enjoy it) below are some quick instructions for tweaking your installation of vSphere 4.
You will need:
- A supported system: Check the VMware HCL first. ESXi is a little picky, specifically around hard disk controllers. For vSphere 4 only 64bit platforms are supported!
- A USB stick: anything over 1 gig will be fine, but get something fast and reliable.
- The VMware ISO: It can be downloaded for free (with registration) at http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/. You will receive a email after with your free serial number.
Step 1) Now that you have the above, extract the ISO using whatever software you like. For this I will be using winrar.
Step 2) Navigate to where you extracted the ISO and open up image.tgz (this is different than ESXi 3.5 as before you needed to extract install.tgz). Browse to "usrlibvmwareinstaller" and extract VMware-VMvisor-big-164009-x86_64.dd.bz2.
Step 3) You should now have a uncompressed disk image with a .dd extension (VMware-VMvisor-big-164009-x86_64.dd).
Step 4) At this point I copy the .dd to my Linux system which has the USB stick already inserted. Tail "/var/log/messages" to find out which device your USB stick is. In my case, its /dev/sdm (be sure about this one, you don't want to image your / partition by accident or something equally bad). This step could also be completed in windows using a disk imaging software like WinImage.
Step 5) At the command line execute "dd bs=1M if=VMware-VMvisor-big-164009-x86_64.dd.bz2 of =/dev/sdm" and wait. When completed, it should return that it wrote approximately 900 megs to /dev/sdm.
Step 6) Insert USB stick into your ESXi system and boot from it. This might require some BIOS tweaking. ESXi will now be booting up, once that's complete you will want to set a password and give it a static IP.
Step 7) You're done!
