Install ESXi 5.1 from a USB Flash Drive

VMware

Many servers already come with a DVD/CD-ROM drive or some kind of ability to virtually mount an ISO image from a network share onto your server to then install ESXi. However, not all do or you just want to have your ESXi image readily available. Here’s a quick step by step instructions on how to use a USB flash drive to install ESXi.

  1. Download ESXi 5.1 from VMware (if you haven’t already) as well as UNettbootin.
  2. Plug in your USB Flash Drive.
  3. Open UNetbootin and select “Diskimage”, set Type to “USB Drive”, select Drive letter of your USB flash drive, and set the path of your ESXi 5.1 ISO image. Then click on “OK”.
    unetbootin setup

  4. The next process could take several minutes before completing.
    unetbootin imaging
  5. Once finished simply click on “Exit”
    unetbootin finished

You now have a USB flash drive that you can use to install ESXi 5.1 from onto your server. Simply power on your server and boot from the USB thumb drive to start the installation.

Similar Posts

My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade

My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade

Home Lab
39 Comments

Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.

For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.

At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.

I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.

So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!

Read More “My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade”

Intel NUC i5 5th Generation an ESXi lab improvement

Home Lab
18 Comments

Intel NUC BLKNUC5I5MYHE 5th gen

For the past year and a half I’ve been using the Intel i5 3rd Gen NUC’s in my ESXi home lab with great success. In this time several people have asked if I recommend anything newer, and while Intel had a few 4th gen models I wasn’t really sold on them as most CPU benchmarks put them the same as my 3rd gen or lower and only added support for a 2.5″ drive which at the time I didn’t need but then Intel released news about several Intel NUC 5th generation models!

Read More “Intel NUC i5 5th Generation an ESXi lab improvement”

Another CBT bug found in VMware ESXi 6.0

VMware
0 Comments

VMware

VMware just published KB 2136854 regarding a new bug found in ESXi 6.0 that causes virtual machine backups, which use Changed Block Tracking (CBT), to be inconsistent. VMware says the cause of the issue is this:

This issue occurs due to an issue with CBT in the disklib area, this causes the change tracking information of I/Os that occur during snapshot consolidation to be lost. The main backup payload data is never lost and it is always written to the backend device. However, the corresponding change tracking information entries which occur during the consolidation task are missed. Subsequent QueryDiskChangedAreas() calls do not include these missed blocks, hence a backup based on this CBT data is inconsistent.

Read More “Another CBT bug found in VMware ESXi 6.0”

VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 1 available

VMware
0 Comments

VMware has released vSphere 6.0 Update 1, ESXi 6.0 U1 and updates for several other VMware products:

Read More “VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 1 available”