Last week I took the time to upgrade my old vmware ESXi 4.0 installation at home. It is runnnig on a HP ML110 with 8GB Ram and a three 2TB Western Digital Green disks.

It’s been running great for what I needed it for but I have been thinking of upgrading ESXi to VSphere version 5.5 for a long time. The installation has been running from an USB-drive so I could remove or add new drives to the server and that it was pretty easy to backup the installation.

Upgrading or a new install, that was the question. I decided on a new installation since all I needed was a second USB-drive to install version 5.5 and then boot from that USB-drive. The last years I have been using Unetbootin to create my bootable USB-drives but this time to my dismay, it didn’t find my USB-stick when running the software.

What to do? A quick search on google  returned a few topics with the same problem and in one thread another software was suggested. The name was RUFUS !

Reading the website on what it could do I decided to give it a try and I loved it from the first run.

It can be especially useful for cases where:

• you need to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.)
• you need to work on a system that doesn’t have an OS installed
• you need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS
• you want to run a low-level utility

Despite its small size, Rufus provides everything you need and you can easily put it on a USB-stick and bring it with you wherever you go.

I recommend this piece of software for anyone who has the needs to create bootable pen-drives.

download link for you who missed the link above: http://rufus.akeo.ie/

GitHub link: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus

As a last note, yes the upgrade when smooth and I am now running the latest version of VSphere on my home server:)