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You are here: Home / Automation / Quick Tip - Automating ESXi 8.0 install using allowLegacyCPU=true

Quick Tip - Automating ESXi 8.0 install using allowLegacyCPU=true

10.17.2022 by William Lam // 2 Comments

For those looking to install ESXi 8.0 but have an unsupported CPU, the following kernel boot option allowLegacyCPU=true can be added which would bypass the installer pre-check as shown in the screenshot below.

When the ESXi installer bypass happens, instead of an error which forces you to reboot, you will get a warning message and user must acknowledge they understand they are using an unsupported CPU and then continue with the installation.

Note: For more information, also checkout my vSphere 8 Homelab considerations blog post for more tips and tricks.

For an interactive installation of ESXi, the additional acknowledgment is not an issue but for an automated installation of ESXi using Kickstart, this can be a problem since you are still required to manually hit enter before the installation actually begins. The question from a couple of my readers, is there a workaround for this?

Yes and there are actually a couple of options that can be passed into ESXi Kickstart script depending on which pre-check messages you would like ignored for automated installations.

  • --ignoreprereqwarnings - Will ignore warning messages
  • --ignoreprereqerrors - Will ignore error messages
  • --forceunsupportedinstall - Will ignore error/warning messages for deprecated CPUs

As you can see from the screenshot above (testing ESXi 8.0 on 2011 Apple Mac Mini), I have both an error for my unsupported CPU and a warning for my unsupported network adapter and so BOTH ignore warning/error options will required for the ESXi installer to continue with the installation without prompting for user input.

Here is a working Kickstart example that demonstrates the use of the two options:

vmaccepteula
install --firstdisk=local --overwritevmfs --ignoreprereqwarnings --ignoreprereqerrors
reboot

network --bootproto=static --ip=192.168.30.13 --netmask=255.255.255.0 --gateway=192.168.30.1 --hostname=nuc.primp-industries.com --nameserver=192.168.30.1 --addvmportgroup=1
rootpw VMware1!

%firstboot --interpreter=busybox

# enable & start SSH
vim-cmd hostsvc/enable_ssh
vim-cmd hostsvc/start_ssh

# enable & start ESXi Shell
vim-cmd hostsvc/enable_esx_shell
vim-cmd hostsvc/start_esx_shell

# Suppress ESXi Shell warning
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /UserVars/SuppressShellWarning -i 1

Note: In some cases, you may need all three options to successfully install ESXi without any prompts due to deprecated CPUs rather than unsupported CPUs

More from my site

  • Automated ESXi Installation with a USB Network Adapter using Kickstart
  • How to bootstrap vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) on unsupported hardware?
  • Nested ESXi installation using HTTPS boot over VirtualEFI in vSphere 8
  • ACPI motherboard layout requires EFI - Considerations for switching VM firmware in vSphere 8 
  • Applying additional security hardening enhancements in ESXi 8.0

Categories // Automation, ESXi, vSphere 8.0 Tags // ESXi 8.0, kickstart, vSphere 8.0

Comments

  1. Fereidoun says

    10/17/2022 at 9:16 am

    thank you for the info

    Reply
  2. MICHAEL S TUCKER says

    11/23/2022 at 9:14 am

    Awesome info! Thank you so much for posting.!

    Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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