Make a bootable ESX 3.5i USB stick from a Mac

June 16th at 12:00am

As part of our migration to virtualized infrastructure we needed a temporary location to store our server images. The only server that was available was an old 32 bit IBM system with IDE drives that the ESXi installer did not want to recognize.

 

Notes:

  • These steps were executed on a Mac running version 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
  • We picked ESX 3i/3.5i as the 4.x series requres a 64 bit chip to install
  • While I used a 16GB flash drive, you can probably get by using a smaller drive (YMMV)
  • The contents of the USB drive will be erased and replaced with the bootable install of ESX

To get around the IDE detection issue, I decided to boot ESXi from a USB stick. While there is a lot of information for how to set this up using Windows and Linux systems, the only computer I had available was a Mac.

Here are the steps which worked for me:

  1. Plug in the USB drive to the Mac
  2. Open up the Disk Utility tool (found under /Applications/Utilities)
  3. Select the USB Drive from the list on the left and click on the Erase tab
  4. Pick MS-DOS (FAT) for the format and hit the Erase… button
    .. This may take a minute or 2 to complete

  5. While still in the Disk Utility, click on File -> Open Disk Image…
  6. Select the ESX 3.5i ISO and click OK
    .. This will mount the ISO
  7. Find and extract the INSTALL.TGZ file located on the mounted ISO (Right-click and open with Archive Utility)

  8. Open Terminal.app
  9. At the command line run diskutil list to find where the USB drive is mounted. Sample output from the command:
    /dev/disk0
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *250.1 GB   disk0
       1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS HDDisk              249.7 GB   disk0s2
    /dev/disk1
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:                            CDROM                  *271.0 MB   disk3
    /dev/disk2
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *16.0 GB    disk4
       1:                 DOS_FAT_32 UNTITLED                16.0 GB    disk4s1

  10. Unmount the disk using diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskx (where 'diskx' is the identifier returned by diskutil)
  11. Navigate to the directory where you extracted install.tgz. In my case I ran this:
    cd /Users/username/Downloads/INSTALL
  12. Inside the INSTALL folder we want to navigate to the installer folder:
    cd /usr/lib/vmware/installer
  13. Run this command to make the USB stick bootable with ESXi:
    bzcat VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_5-207095.i386.dd.bz2 | dd of=/dev/disk4

    This operation could take some time to complete (around 10 minutes using my 16GB Flash drive)

After this operation completed I was able to remove the USB drive and boot the IBM server.