Looking at the ESXi Installable Setup guides for 4.1 and 4.0 reveals a change. In 4.0 under System Requirements, a USB drive was listed as a possible boot device, as well as being usable for installation. So you could stick in your installation media and select USB as the destination.
Under 4.1, USB is no longer listed in the documentation as [...]
vSphere 4.1 has been out for a couple of days now.
As well as the new features which have been covered extensively (see What’s New), the release notes list some future changes for the product range. They’re not really hidden but haven’t been given much publicity.
ESX will be dropped in future releases, with ESXi being the h [...]
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