Unless I am working with an unreleased version of ESXi, I usually install it by booting from a USB drive that includes an embedded Kickstart configuration file, that will fully automate the installation.
For a single ESXi host deployment, this workflow works great but if you have more than one host with different ESXi Kickstart configuration files, you will either need multiple USB drives or you have to keep updating the embedded Kickstart file reference using a single USB device.
There are a number of different ways to solve this problem, I have covered many of the solutions in my Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation at Scale session at VMware Explore.
With that said, since I have been deploying several Minisforum MS-A2 for use with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, I wanted to explore a solution that had been requested in the past but I never had the time to look into, which is creating a custom ESXi boot menu that would allow you to select specific ESXi version and/or kickstart configuration files.
