In my example, I have named the VM Nested-ESXi-Virtual-USB and will be referencing the name throughout the instructions.ĭepending on your use case, you may or may not need create an additional Virtual Disk because our Virtual USB storage device can also be used, which also mimics the behavior you get with a physical USB storage device that contains the ESXi installer. You will also need to add a USB Controller (3.1) before completing the VM creation wizard. Step 3 - Create a new VM and select Other / VMware ESXi 7.0 or later as the GuestOS and configure the desired compute resources. Step 2 - Transfer the ESXi IMG file to your ESXi host datastore
Hdiutil convert 86_64.iso -format UDRW -o esxi70u3d.img For macOS users, you can use the hdiutil command-line utility and the syntax is the following: Step 1 - Convert your desired ESXi ISO image into the IMG format. I definitely wish I had learned about this earlier and it goes to show, all the hard engineering efforts made by our VMware Engineers to make testing and using our software as easy as possible even without needing real physical hardware 😀 It turns out you can just present a Virtual Disk (VMDK) to a VM running ESXi (Nested ESXi) and through a special driver, it will recognize the device as a USB storage device! While searching further, I came to learn that not only was this possible, but it was also a common method for testing USB-based installation without the hassle of messing with physical hardware.
While thinking about his question, I also recall we had made some enhancements to our Virtual USB interface that would allow user to back it using a disk file. I honestly was not aware of any mechanisms that would allow for this and I normally would just passthrough a real USB device to a Nested ESXi VM for this type of testing purposes.
My buddy Alan Renouf had pinged me earlier today and asked whether it was possible to emulate a USB storage device that could aide him in the testing the installation of ESXi from a USB device but without having to use a real USB device.
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