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You are here: Home / ESXi / Failed to locate kickstart on Nested ESXi VM CD-ROM in VCF 9.0

Failed to locate kickstart on Nested ESXi VM CD-ROM in VCF 9.0

06.20.2025 by William Lam // 2 Comments

If you are automating the installation of ESXi using a scripted installation (aka Kickstart) and the KS.CFG is located on a CD-ROM device and you happen to be using a Nested ESXi VM and see the following message:

cannot find kickstart file on cd-rom with path -- /KS.CFG


You are probably using an IDE-based controller for the CD-ROM device, which the underlying IDE driver for ESXi has been removed as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.


The fix is to simply remove the IDE controller and use a SATA controller and things will work as expected!

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Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere 9.0 Tags // ESXi 9.0, kickstart, Nested ESXi, VCF 9.0

Comments

  1. *protectedvirtualizandoaju says

    06/20/2025 at 3:59 pm

    Thanks bro! I faced this problem yesterday before going to sleep 🙂 And today you come with the solution 🙂

    Reply
  2. *protectedmattheldstab says

    06/27/2025 at 1:09 pm

    I thought I would try to YOLO it myself and ran into this issue. Of course this is the first place I checked and you had the answer! Thanks again for everything, William.

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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Recent

  • Ultimate Lab Resource for VCF 9.0 06/25/2025
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