Last updated $Date: 2008-08-26 19:50:14 $
Martti Kupar
inen <martti.kuparinen@iki
.fi>
http://www.iki.fi/kuparine/comp/vmware/esxionusb.html
This is how I installed VMware ESXi on a USB memory stick in order to test it on my PC. With this setup you don't need to overwrite your existing HDDs. However, you need to have some external storage for the virtual machines (iSCSI or NFS) to really try VMware ESXi.
VMware, Inc. has a bare-metal hypervisor for AMD and Intel x86 CPUs called ESXi which is now available for free of charge. Of course I wanted to try this but first without modifying my existing setup. Inspired by various reports, I installed ESXI on a USB memory stick in order to play with it.
First fetch the latest VMware ESXi from www.vmware.com. Next you need a 1 GB or larger USB memory stick. Make sure the stick (or any partition from it) is not mounted before executing the following commands.
# Set these to match your USB memory stick and the latest VMware ESXi version export USB=/dev/sdc export VER=3.5.0_Update_2-110271 # Make sure the stick is not mounted df -h | grep ${USB} # Create the bootable USB memory stick sudo mount -o loop VMware-ESXi-${VER}.i386.iso /mnt tar xzf /mnt/install.tgz -C /tmp sudo umount /mnt cd /tmp/usr/lib/vmware/installer bzcat VMware-VMvisor-big-${VER}.i386.dd.bz2 | dd of=${USB} cd rm -rf /tmp/usr