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CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI HOW TO
CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI INSTALL
CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI UPDATE
CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI PASSWORD
CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI ISO

It took a while but the manufacturer came up with BIOS updates that addressed most issues. Mainly, complete lack of support for my LSI SAS card and unstable booting from USB devices. When I bought it some good months ago, it came with what I think was a half-baked BIOS. You should now have an ESXi host that is run off of a USB flash drive and is ready for action in your new VMware environment!įirst, I’d like to say that you’re doing an awesome work for the enthusiastic community, keep it up!Īs for running ESX from a USB drive – I currently have a very stable ESXi 5.1 host (somewhat resembles one of your builds actually) based on Gigabyte’s GA-Z77X-UD5H which I think is a super motherboard for many.

Your ESXi Host is ready to go! head over to one of the links shown in the yellow on your host to download the vSphere client and get running!.

Add in your DNS servers and a hostname ( THE HOSTNAME IS THE NAME FOR THIS ESXi SERVER).

Use the SPACEBAR to select ( X) the NICs you will be using.

Once your system reboots you will be able to login to the interface and setup your host.

Upon completion your host will need to reboot.

Once again we will confirm the installation… hit ‘F11’.

CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI PASSWORD

DO NOT FORGET WHAT YOUR PASSWORD IS! Hit ‘ENTER’

Here you will create your root password.

After it scans the device it will give you a confirmation box.

We can do this because the installer is loaded into the RAM and won’t be affected by this.

CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI INSTALL

We are going to go ahead and install ESXi over the top of everything.

As you can see it sees the flash drive (obviously since it just loaded from there).

Your host should start booting up the installation.

( MAKE SURE YOUR BIOS IS SETUP TO BOOT FROM USB).

Place the flash drive in your ESXi host and power on the machine.

Once it is complete, you are ready to rock and roll!

It will begin creating your bootable image.

make sure you have the correct drive selected.

browse for your installer ( should say VMvisor in the name).

CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI ISO

make sure ISO is selected in the drop down.

Plug your flash drive into the computer.

If unetbootin does not work for you, give Rufus a shot)

unetbootin (unetbootin-windows-583.exe) (I have been told that Rufus is fast and easy, similar to unetbootin.

To create the bootable ESXi drive you will need a few things. I chose an 8GB over a 1-4GB because I can store the logs on the empty space of this drive (however, I’m currently storing them on a datastore in my NAS)… You have the option at least. There is no need to use USB 3.0 flash drives. You can use pretty much any flash drive you want.

I purchased an ADATA Classic Series C008 8GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive. I mean, all it really does anyway is load ESXi into RAM, so unless you are planning on using an internal hard drive for something else, why not just drop $6 and get a flash drive instead. Just as a side note, you will still need to go to and get a license, be it the free version or the paid version, in order to use ESXi longer than 60 days.In trying to save some money on your home lab, you might consider booting ESXi from a USB Flash drive. When it’s done remove the USB Stick from the computer and go load some servers! Now just sit tight while it writes the image. Next, you will be warned that your flash drive will be erased. You can find both at the end of this article, they are zipped to save space, but unzip them to your desktop and then select one of them in the next dialog box.

CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI UPDATE

The two options are the generic VMware ESXi 4.1 Update 1 You will be asked what image you want to restore… You will need to change type to “All files”, and select one of the images that I created. Next pick which USB stick you want to install to, then click ok. The basic process is to download and install WinImage from then open it up and select “Restore Virtual Hard Disk image on physical drive…” I created the images on a 1GB thumb drive so you will need at least that to make the images work, but they should work fine on drives that are larger. So I thought that I would share the images that I created so that all you need is to use something like WinImage to write them to the USB stick.

CONNECT USB BACKUP DRIVE TO ESXI HOW TO

Vallard from Vallard’s Tech Note’s has a great How-To on how to do this, but unless you have a Linux box standing by it can be a pain. Luckily there is a way to create a USB stick (thumb drive) that you can use to install ESXi from. Lately, more and more servers are shipping without CD or DVD drives, and if you are like me, you don’t want to carry a USB CD/DVD drive with you.