At my day job we are experimenting more and more with server virtualization. We have been playing with VMware as our platform. We currently run one physical server (host) with 6 different virturalized servers.
We recently purchased a new HP DL 380 G8 server with dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2603 (1.80GHz/4-core/10MB/80W) Processors and 64 GB (16x4GB) Dual Rank x8 PC3L-10600 (DDR3-1333) memory. This would supplement our current VMware server and give us redundancy and fail-over capabilities.
The first step in the process was to download the latest and greatest currently at VMware ESXi 5.1. I download it and its in the form of an ISO. Not a big deal I have a utility to burn it to DVD and make it bootable for install. Whoops the new DL380 doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive.
I find a tool on line called Linux Live USB Creator. It works great to create a bootable USB device using Linux. The tool allows you to include your ISO to start as well. The tool worked flawlessly. However I discovered that the VMware ISO I had was missing some HP Drivers.
I quickly searched the VMware site and found the HP specific ISO. Unfortunately the links for the HP stuff were broken.
Another quick search and I found another tool to create a HP specific ISO. The tool is the ESXI Customizer. It requires the installation of the VMware vSphere PowerCLI.