Creating a Bootable ESXi USB Stick on Mac OS X

From: link

Creating a Bootable ESXi USB Stick on Mac OS X

Thursday, January 8, 2009 in Macintosh, Virtualization by slowe | 29 comments

I recently found myself with a decent HP DL385 G2 server with no hard drives (itused to have hard drives, but now it doesn’t…there’s a long story behind it that I won’t get into here). So, I decided I’d try creating a bootable ESXi USB flash drive to use with the server. There are lots of guides out there for creating bootable ESXi USB flash drives, but none of them were written for users, like myself, who use Mac OS X. Telling a Mac user to use WinImage just doesn’t work, and while Linux-oriented guides are closer, they still don’t address any Mac-specific issues.

So, here’s my guide for creating a bootable ESXi USB flash drive from Mac OS X.

1. Download the ESXi installable ISO.
2. Double-click the ISO to mount it (an icon will appear on your desktop). From there, navigate the contents of the ISO image to find VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-xxxx.i386.dd.bz2 and copy it out of the ISO image into a separate folder.
3. Insert the USB flash drive into an available USB port. Mac OS X will mount the drive and an icon will appear on your desktop.
4. Open the Terminal and type the following command:
   
   diskutil list
   
   On my system, the USB drive was listed as /dev/disk1, but your mileage may vary. It should be pretty easy to tell which device is the USB drive, as the first partition (i.e., /dev/disk1s1) will have a label that matches the name of the icon on the desktop.
5. Type this command:
   
   diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
   
   Replace /dev/disk1 in the command above with the appropriate entry for your system, as identified in the previous command. The icon for the USB flash drive will disappear from your desktop.
6. Run this command:
   
   bzcat <path to VMware-VMvisor file> | dd of=/dev/disk1
   
   Replace /dev/disk1 in the command above with the appropriate entry for your system, as identified by the “diskutil list” command in step 4.

When the process completes—you’ll know because the Terminal prompt will return—use this command to “eject” the USB flash drive and make it safe for physical removal:

diskutil eject /dev/disk1

Again, replace /dev/disk1 with the appropriate device for your system.

At this point, the USB flash drive should be ready to roll. Insert it into a compatible server and virtualize away!

In the process of creating this guide, I found the following sites to be extremely helpful:

mechanised.com: How to Create Your Own Bootable ESXi USB Stick
Create ISO on Mac OS X 10.4 | Martin Bergek
Installing VMware ESXi on a USB memory stick using Ubuntu

For Mac users, the special sauce is the “diskutil” command. Unmounting the USB drive from the Finder also made the underlying BSD device, i.e., /dev/disk1, disappear. Without unmounting it in Finder, the device is reported as “busy” and can’t be accessed (even via root). By using diskutil, we are able to make the device accessible.

Tags: ESXi, Macintosh, Virtualization, VMware

ESXi on Mac Pro/Mini using a bootable USB stick

From: link 

I have managed to successfully install esxi 5 on tte new mac mini server 2011.  i installed refit on the mac mini. i have the primary drive booting too mac os server where refit is installed. i then installed a brand new 1 tb above the 500gb mac mini  server.  i used a program called esxi customiser

http://v-front.blogspot.com/p/esxi-customizer.html#download. i then went onto this website (http://vm-help.com/esx40i/customize_oem_tgz.php)  and downloaded the customised oem.tgz called " Adds Broadcom 5761 support (14e4:1681)" the rest is self explanatory once you download program. One slight problem when i successfully installed esxi5 Refit will not allow it to boot, asking for a boot disk. but if i disconnect the connector from the first hard drive on the mac mini, esxi will boot. currently looking for a better boot manager program, so i dont have to keep disconnecting first drive. really pleased with my work and i think i might be the first person too have done this, as cannott find anybody else who on google who has succesfully done this.

Important reference:

These links may be of interest

http://paraguin.com/2012/01/10/the-mac-mini-vmware-esxi-5-server-part-1-research/

http://paraguin.com/2012/01/10/the-mac-mini-vmware-esxi-5-server-part-2-installation/

http://paraguin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/smcPresent.gif

http://paraguin.com/2012/01/17/os-x-on-a-mac-mini-with-vmware-esxi-5/

Problem to take note:

http://virtualizationinformation.com/esxi-5-on-mac-mini-first-problem/

Detailed steps:

With Regards the  installation of esxi 5 on mac mini,  ive outline the steps below, there were initial problem with getting ethernet working, i have now fixed this. here is an outline of steps so nothing is missed.

Step 1: My Mac Mini Server 2011 came with two 500gb hard drives. i Replaced one hard drive with a 1tb drive and left one 500gb in the bottom half of the mac mini, as i did not want to tear apart mac mini. the 1 tb hard will be were esxi 5 will be installed and mac server hard drive will remain as the primary drive.

Step 2; Installed Refit on 500gb mac Server hard drive.  to allow easy booting off usb and allow esxi 5 to be booted from internal hard drive

Step 3: I downloaded the esxi iso image and the broadcom driver which was hard to find. the broadcom driver can be found at the following.

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esxi50_broadcom_tg3_3_120h_v50_2/dHRAYnRAd2piZHAlZA==

unzip the file and place the bundle on your hard drive.

Step 4

i download  a program called esxi customiser, to customise installation.
http://v-front.blogspot.com/p/esxi-customizer.html#download.

Step 5

Run esxi customiser, and browse to esxi5 iso and the broadcom bundle driver.

Step 6

Download Unibooting and browse to new customised image and load onto usb stick

thats it, quickest and  most simplest way to do this, and now you have coolest esx box in world, all done in less than 5 minutes.