With the number of physical hosts not having CDROMs, along with newer laptops not having burners, I figure it’s time to move away from installing ESX from CDROM in my lab or Customer site.
I had tried VMware’s instructions and failed, and found this method:
Recently I noticed that a new USB multi-boot program called Ventoy. However it was not able to boot ESXi 6.5 installer likely to the UEFI boot. Then a recent update to Ventoy added UEFI boot support, so I decided to try again, and this time Booting ESXi worked !
Note: This allows copying multiple un-modified VMware ISO files to the prepared USB stick, and you can choose which ISO to load at boot time.
Here are a few pictures of the Ventoy boot screen with ESX6.5 and ESX6.7 loaded.
Install Instructions for Windows / Linux here.
Nuance of iqlusion 