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ESXi on Flash Drive?

L

lone wolf

Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
Messages
705
I have seen tutorials on how people have ran ESXi on a thumb/flash drive. I am really interested in doing this. I have tried to get this done and have been unsucessful at the moment. I have it currently installed on a 500gb drive, which is really a big waste of space. I would like to move it to a flash drive so that I can move between servers if needed. (all of my vm servers are identical in specs)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
You don't move it. You just reinstall it on a flash drive. Pop a USB thumb drive in a USB port, boot the ESXi ISO, and choose that as your install target.
 
Cannot move your existing install (AFAIK). Just do a fresh install with the USB drive as the target. You can even plug in the USB drive to your local workstation and install ESXi onto it through a VM.
 
You REALLY don't want to move your existing install - the vmkernel IDs / etc won't match anymore, and that is bad juju.
 
CEpeep said:
Cannot move your existing install (AFAIK). Just do a fresh install with the USB drive as the target. You can even plug in the USB drive to your local workstation and install ESXi onto it through a VM.
Click to expand...

That's what I do.

Install VMware Player/Workstation and create a VM. Mount the ISO as the CD drive and connect a USB drive. Install away, remove USB drive, and put it in your ESXi system to boot from it.
 
I did mine this past weekend.

beFsQ.jpg
 
AMD_Gamer said:
I did mine this past weekend.

beFsQ.jpg
Click to expand...


This is Exactly what I am wanting to do. Thank you Everyone for the advice about not moving the drive once installed. I am still pretty new to the ESXi field. I had installed CentOS and then vmware on top of that. I just built machines using the SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-F-O board, 32 gb ram and 3 1tb drives on an Areca 1222 card.

idea - you were right I didn't ask a question in there. thanks for that:p
 
well after reading the post last night I couldn't sleep. so I raided my kids stockings and pulled the 8gb flash drives out and started to run the installer again. It installed on the flash drive with no problems at all!

so this weekend I am going to be backing up all of my vm's at work, then updating them all to flash drives running ESXi 5, since they were all on 4.1 now.

there is one bad downside...I have to get my kids more stocking items, I ate the candy in the stockings also :rolleyes:
 
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