The BIOS for VMs in VMware Fusion 5 does not seem to let you boot a USB disk, which say, is handy for configuring ESXi after you have installed it to a USB key, but before dropping said key into your homelab. Inconvenient at best… to get around this:
- Download Plop Boot Manager from here
- Mount the ISO and the USB disk on the VM
- Once booted, choose USB:
Thanks to this 2010 post on the same.
Fusion 5 allows you to boot from a USB drive when you use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS. Add
firmware = “efi”
to your .vmx file to play with that.
Your comment does not make sense, or address the issue– the .vmx file for your mac/osx virtual machine will already have this line in it; this is because macs boot by default via efi, including the mac vm in vmware. the problem is getting your mac vm to boot from usb drive.