Making Bootable USB sticks on Windows

Just because I always forget.. All of my workstations are Macs, which I then use to connect to my vSphere and Hyper-V labs. This can make it a challenge to create bootable Windows-based USB sticks for my servers. I used to use unetbootin for Mac, but I found it worked well for my ESX servers (sometimes), but not Windows.

After trial and error, I've found that running a Windows VM on my Mac, then burning a Windows ISO to USB works best when using Rufus.

Oh also, if you're installing esx on a Shuttle and your Realtek NIC doesn't work, this guide will help enable the proper drivers.

esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient esxcli software vib install -d https://vibsdepot.v-front.de -n sata-xahci