bootable usb
vmware esx 3.5i at usb drive with sata support
Yes, it is unsupported, but who cares? As you can read even microsoft does not support windows at vmware :). The VMware ESX 3.5i is free for some time. It is VMware answer for Microsoft’s Hyper-V - I think. Because the system compatybility is rather thin, and I would love to repleace my VMware Server machines with this top product! Because I have just two scsi disks, and a lot of others (sata for example) I would love to make use of it at this machine. What I need is: vmware esx 3.5i iso and a big (1GB is minimum!) pendrive. Let’s rock!
mount the vmware iso
# mount -o loop /storage/VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.iso /mnt/vmCD/
then copy a install.tgz file to some place and extract it:
# cp install.tgz /storage/
# tar xvzf install.tgz
then take a look at file usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd.bz2 “unbzip” it!
# bunzip2 VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd.bz2
then you will have one file, which is a disk image (yes, it’s bigger than 32MB thin install of esx, but it has much more drivers):
# ls -al VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 786432000 sie 13 05:00 VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd
now we are going to write the image at the thumbdrive… it is at /dev/sda in my system
# dd if=VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-110271.i386.dd of=/dev/sda
after this, you have a bootable USB key (look if your bios support it!)! thanks to: vm-help for its tutorial