USB BOOT of ESXi

[minos]

The boot and program works great, the only thing I need to figure out is how to set the network settings (ip address...default nic) to be persistent on boot.

Also is there a way to setup jumbo frames on it? :smileyblush:

[nick_couchman]

With a USB boot stick, ESXi should write the network changes out to the USB boot device. I boot a couple of machines off USB sticks, and the network changes are always written back to the USB stick and are persistent at the next boot.

[minos]

Do you know which files stores those settings?

[nick_couchman · Accepted solution]

There are several files in /etc/vmware on the ESXi machine that store the info. When you update the configuration, the files that change are written into the tgz archive /bootbank/local.tgz and /altbootbank/local.tgz. When the ESXi machine reboots, it reads in the local.tgz file and overlays the contents into the existing filesystem, replacing the defaults.