No it's not. Not for my situation.
We frequently use vmware to move servers temporarily to a virtualized environment, this frees up the hardware. So we can redeploy it.
I do this at customers. I can hardly drag a vmware environment around to deploy vmware. CD's get outdated fast and you don't want to know how many times I've burned ESX(i). Also, more and more servers come without optical drives these days. A USB stick is easily dragged along (I have 8 of em) and is faster than CD/DVD too. Can easily create a stick with kickstart, but it is mandatory then to have it autoformat, which I don't really like (it's fine for new servers, but in the situation I want to use them it's easy to screw up like that).
Did I mention that before 4.1 this always worked just fine? The logic is there (kickstart knows how to find the media), but the interactive installer is just retarded in the way that it only looks for installation files on CD media, except when used with kickstart. Tried looking at the initrd that gets passed, but it's an ELF binary, not the usual initrd disk image with just some scripts on it.
From my point of view they killed another perfectly fine feature, with no good reason. Then again, they seem to be getting good at that.
. As stated it works fine for 3.5 and 4.0 (obviously you have to run syslinux against the stick and rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg). It does NOT work with 4.1. Installer will load fine, but at the time it actually should start to install it starts whining it can't find the installation files.
