New to Enterprise Gear - Looking for a Starting Point

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MazerRackham101

New Member
Jul 31, 2019
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Why make things so complicated for yourself...install it onto a wee USB stick on your PC and then boot the server from that on the internal USB port :)

Now while I agree that there are a gazillion ways to go about this, most of which work out fine, until you work out the kinks, keep it simple ;)
So it took a re-read to figure out that you were saying I had a USB port directly on my motherboard inside the case. I used Rufus to create a bootable USB drive and plugged it in directly to the server, which failed with the exact same screen.
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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I meant install ESXi onto the USB drive and boot the server from that. Then use your SSD for your datastore to hold your VM's :)

To be a little clearer, you can create installable media using a USB drive and install onto a HDD or SSD from that, or you can install the ESXi directly to the USB stick and boot ESXi from there.
 

MazerRackham101

New Member
Jul 31, 2019
12
0
1
Yeah, so I used Rufus to mount the Image onto a flash drive and tried booting from it the "old fashioned" way with no joy. I actually don't even get to the point where I can choose to install it.
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
1,708
515
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Canada
Assuming that the image has been written correctly and the USB is bootable, all you should need do is select the USB stick from the boot options menu at boot time. Make sure the BIOS boot options are set to match, and then proceed to installing ESXi onto your boot disk.

However, if you use VMware player on your PC/ Laptop, you can install ESXi right onto the USB stick, and then after placing it back in the server and setting the boot options in the BIOS to point to it, the server should boot and run ESXi from the USB stick instead. After that, you add your SSD as a datastore and go about configuring your VM's etc :)

Here is a dinky-linky to a reasonable tut on what I'm banging on about :D