Love this. Saves me having several USB drives with different Operating Systems on them. And now you can buy relatively cheap flash drives that go up to 512GB & can stuff loads of ISOs onto it and boot into them with Ventoy.
According to that page it supports many versions of Windows too, as well as VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Xen XCP-ng.
So probably a good idea to check those two lists first before choosing which operating systems you want to use with it, if you are looking to get something that works with the least amount of effort.
And if you have time to spare then try some that are currently marked as not working, or which have not been tested, and figure out how to get those working too and contribute that info to the Ventoy maintainer via their GitHub :)
I spent a while making the perfect portable Linux USB SSD with persistent storage and a universally mountable data partition using ventoy - then discovered that my Surface Laptop 3 can't boot upstream Linux and gave up on the whole endeavor.
This is a bit off topic, but I'd love to hear more detail as to your home network setup. I've seen netboot.xyz before but I have no real knowledge as to how such a setup would work.
What I did was get up a server as DHCP server on the LAN, install tftpd on it and have netboot.xyz on it. Then for other machines (inside same LAN) that you want to boot something or install a distro, you would boot LAN, the dhcp server you set up will automatically let that other machine boot into netboot.xyz and then you can choose your distro.
It works really well for colocation server where you don't have the freedom to go there and plug in an Usb or a DVD because it's 1000km away in the footsteps of a hotspring in Iceland for example.
I have a Synology NAS running a TFTP server with the netboot.xyz payload, and I configured the DHCP server on my UDM Pro (https://store.ui.com/products/udm-pro) to announce the NAS's IP address as the netboot server.
This website is missing an "installation" section or a "how the fuck do I start using this". Dear developers, even if your software is easy to install and use, don't assume that everyone knows which method you've chosen to install and use your software. There are a million ways to do things, and I can't read your mind.
I screwed around with Ventoy for a while but couldn't get it to work for my use case. This was along with a slew of other USB booting solutions including (but not limited to) unetbootin, rufus, Sardu, lili, and yumi.
We have an obscure imaging program we licensed for our Windows fleet, and I wanted to do it along with a normal Windows 10 boot on one USB connected ssd. Finally got it working after days of research with just manually creating the partitions and putting them in the right order.
I'd lay out the part table, but I'm not at work...
*edit: I feel I should mention the imaging program is Windows based, maybe Windows PE (is that still a thing?). It does the spinning Windows 10 wait animation until booted.
PE exists as a 'lightweight' Windows environment and is basically what you are using as you install Windows from DVD/USB/ISO.
Under the bonnet there are also command line tools included in Windows such as DISM and WinImage and good old DiskPart that can be used to edit and dump a copy of the Windows OS (as a .wim file) onto a SSD/HDD and then boot it and let it auto-configure to the hardware.
I remember the day I've found Sardu, it was mind blowing, but they have this ridiculous thing about naming the ISOs and copying is really slow, now with Ventoy it's just work TM. We've come a long way.
This is actually nice, I can put ISOs from any Type-C device onto this drive without worrying about needing access to another working PC in order create a bootable drive to format my own systems.
I am not sure if this is what you are asking, but you can create a bootable USB with ventoy on macos using Virtualbox.
Create a VM with no storage, boot from the ventoy ISO, pass through the USB port from the host machine. I used this a couple of days back to create a bootable ventoy drive from my Macbook Pro.
I find Ventoy really good! Saves juggling many USB drives and it worked fine with the ISOs I tested including Windows 10, Macrium Reflect’s recovery disc, and Ubuntu. I was pretty close to buying a hardware solution (iodd) but for simple needs, Ventoy seems solid.
I've had the opposite experience, every single one works great first try but with most operating systems releasing at least twice per year these days. As such I haven't found the need to have a big list of options that I'll install more than once or twice anyways. That combined with UEFI there isn't much process to make USBs bootable.
Persistence always seemed cool on these types of tools but similarly I've never needed a persistent USB I'll boot from often enough to make the persistence more of a benefit than a burden.
I find that it is reliable for Linux and Windows. It is easy to copy an ISO onto a flash drive, it can store multiple ISOs, and those ISOs can be updated without overwriting other data on the drive. This means application installers and data backups can be stored on the same drive, making it a very convenient recovery drive.
As for other operating systems, they seem to boot partially but the boot process ultimately fails when they try to access the drive directly.
If you worry about that just format the partition with the OS iso instead of using ventoy. Ventoy is harmless but you never know what can happen and if you're that paranoid for good reasons, having a signature file that can vouch for your iso not being modified + being 100% sure you are booting into that ISO defeats all the conveniences in the world that Ventoy or Any-other-solution gives you.
