So, I think I may have jumped the gun on rolling out ESXi to some servers here in the office. I was planning on using USB thumb drives to boot ESXi (using the method described, extracting the dd image, using WinImage to write it to a thumb drive, etc.) and then just replacing them every 6 months or so during a regular hardware maintenance cycle. The power savings from not having SAS drives in the system will more than cover the cost of the thumb drives and if the power goes out it should buy me a few extra minutes of run time.

It seems to me though that ESXi won't boot correctly from any thumb drive or memory card that is detected by Windows as "Removable". The boot process starts OK but then hangs with a few "Waiting for USB Boot Partition to show up" messages, followed by a final "PANIC: Failed to find USB Boot Partition". The original thumb drives I was testing with showed up in Windows as a "fixed" disk, not "removable" as every other drive I've tested since.

Does anyone have ESXi working on a USB drive that is presented to Windows as "Removable"? If not, does anyone know of any small thumb drives that work?

Jason Litka
http://www.jasonlitka.com