ESXi 4.1 unattended install now possible to SD-CARD/USB

Ernst Cozijnsen over at Capgemini has found a way to install ESXi 4.1 unattended to SD-CARD / USB. Here are his findings: For a few weeks it was bugging me heavily that the ESXi 4.1 installer didn’t want to install to the internal SD-Card of our newly bought systems. Together with Max Daneri (creator of the PXE Manager) http://labs.vmware.com/flings/pxe-manager we searched for a possible cause because the debug installer was telling us “well I can’t install because somebody said I’m not allowed”.

With this in the back of my mind the urge to solve it grew by the minute and it almost became an obsession to find a working solution. A few days ago we cracked it! And it works like a charm.

In a nutshell:

- USB targets are not supported by default (we fixed this by disabling the check for it)
- The minimal target size should be 5.1GB (we scaled it down to 3.7GB so SD-Cards are supported)
- The SCRATH partition of 4GB (also scaled that one down to 2 GB)
- VMFS grow partition (VMFS of USB?? Neah….. isn’t going to fly so we removed it completely)

Replace you ienviron.vgz with this file (http://www.screencast.com/t/pusv1KGq3) and happy installing. If your to curious and want to know the exact modification: Unpack the file and search/grep on “ernst” in /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/* and /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/scripted/

If  you are using the “PXE manager”, modify the “kickstart” part so that you don’t use Local or Remote but instead use device driver.  As device driver you enter usb-storage. Oh…. just one more thing:  VMware support urged me to say that this hack is not supported by VMware! So this is a non-supported but very welcome hack. :-)