Installing VMware ESXi on a USB memory stick using Ubuntu

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

Abstract

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.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Installing VMware ESXi on a USB memory stick
3. References

Introduction

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.

Installing VMware ESXi on a USB memory stick

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

References