Mac Mini change of role

My home lab used to be a couple of ESXi VMs running under VMware Fusion on a Mac Mini. Since moving much of my home lab to be portable and adding the NAS I am finding I no longer run these VMs.

After a bit of thinking,  I decided my best option would be to look to make a boot able ESXi Embedded USB key,  then if I needed to host more VMs I can just boot it straight to ESXi.

To create a boot able ESXi Embedded USB key I used my Windows 7 laptop and VMware Workstation to create a new VM,  connected the VMware Installable ISO as CD drive and hard drive as physical disk then select the USB key.






I was a little worried when doing this that I had selected the correct as during selection there was no way of telling.





I did a double check during the early part of install of ESXi to ensure the drive size matched the USB key and not the HDD.  Other than that was pretty straight forwards,  just selected the country and password etc,  once it was build and running,  I powered it down,  delected the donor VM.

The downside I thought I would have when trying to boot the Mac mini is that to select boot from USB I needed to press Option key after POST,  however,  I only run a bluetooth keyboard so wasn't sure if this got picked up during boot up.

But hurrah,  not only did the bluetooth keyboard work for selecting alternate boot,  it also works within ESXi !