Kickstart 4.1 - getting it to install onto a USB Stick or SD card

[dgwhite]

I am wondering if it's possible to kickstart ESX 4.1 and have it install onto a USB stick or SD card? I have used kickstart to install onto hard drives but can't seem to get it to install on removable media. A manual install onto SD/USB works great. I believe the hang up is with autopart on the ks.cfg

Any help is appreciated!

Thx,

Dan

[StephenMoll]

I have been trying to solve this porblem too, and have got this far...

This being the contents of my ks.cfg file on my USB stick:

vmaccepteula
serialnum --esx=??????????????????????????
keyboard uk
rootpw ????????
autopart --disk=mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0
install usb
network --bootproto=dhcp --device=vmnic0

This recognises that I want to perform the install to the SD-Card i the host, but then complains that the volume is too small, and that it doesn't support VMFS.

I am thinking that the autopart command needs some more complex settings, as I am guessing that the script is trying to install the ESXi hypervisor and the VMFS volume onto the SD-card which will of course fail. What we really want is for the hypervisor to be installed, and nothing else. The VMFS datastore is going to be on a RAID array, which in many cases already has data on it.

Unfortunately I don't know enough to take this further at the moment which is why I am here to try and find some pointers.

[DSTAVERT]

Scripted install to USB or SD (embedded) is not supported.

[bdworak]

Thats great but if you are installing from a usb stick you have no choice but to use ths ks=usb option... They need to come up with a work around for that 

[bdorlus]

This is a real problem for someone that's planning an installation of 30+ esxi 4.1u1 installation to Embedded SD-Cards.  😞

Will esxi5 have this function available?