This article is a guide on how to always have your version of the ESX hypervisor in your pocket and be able to try any system if it boots with VMware’s flagship hypervisor, the ESX 3i free version with no limits of use.
First of all, you need to have the version that can be downloaded from the VMware website .
Then get a USB stick of at least 750 MB
The winimage software to create the boot from the USB
The 7-zip software to unzip the files we need
Open the ISO image downloaded from the VMware website with Winimage or 7-zip
VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.iso
Open the install.tgz file and extract the install.tar file
Open the install.tar file, again with 7-zip and extract the file
/usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.dd.bz2
Always open it with Winimage and extract the file VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.dd
This file is our image that must be copied to the flash drive, now opening Winimage (as administrators) and selecting the item:
Restore Virtual Hard Disk image on physical drive,
Then select our pen-drive and finally the extracted .dd image and return it to the pen-drive.
We thus have our bootable USB stick with the ESX3i server Hypervisor, ready to host our virtual machines.