A question that continues to pop up from time to time is whether it is possible to prompt for user input during an interactive or scripted installation of ESXi? This is actually something I have written about before using PXE boot options as a workaround to provide for a semi-interactive automated installation of ESXi. The most recent request for this was not actually from a customer but rather someone internally working at VMware. The individual noted that he had already read my blog and a few other references but was still hopeful for a solution. I remember when I had looked into this problem several years back, I was not able to find anything and the inquiries to VMware (which I was still a customer at the time) came up empty.

UPDATE (01/10/19) - For ESXi 6.5 or greater, please take a look at this blog post for an updated solution

After replying back to the individual with the information that I had, it actually got me thinking which is usually not good 😉 Having just recently finished building a new Kickstart environment to test UEFI PXE boot for ESXi 6.0, I figure I might as well take another look at this topic again. I wanted to see if there was something that could be done with one of the /dev/ttyl (teletype) interfaces while the ESXi Installation was running. I did a couple of Google searches and to my surprise, there was someone on the VMTN Community forum who had already solved this problem and posted a solution almost 1 year before my article, not sure how I could have missed that?!

In ESXi, there are only two TTY interfaces: TTY1 (/dev/tty1) and TTY2 (/dev/tty2) and during the installation of ESXi, /dev/tty2 is used by the interactive installer and /dev/tty1 is used by the ESXi Shell login for troubleshooting/debugging purposes. If you try to overlay another menu system on top of the existing one, what you will find is that although it is possible to prompt for user input, the user keystrokes would not be properly being sent due to having two menus as mentioned by VMTN Community user mossko. The clever solution that was identified by cacheman was to simply disable the console login and free up TTY1 which could then be used to present a custom menu and prompt for user input. This was accomplished by creating a custom TGZ file called "extras.tgz" (you can name it anything you want) which would contain a modified copy of the /etc/inittab file which has the following line commented out:

#tty1::respawn:/bin/initterm.sh tty1 /bin/techsupport.sh

You would then append this TGZ to the ESXi's boot.cfg file which would then overwrite the existing inittab and prevent ESXi Shell from running on TTY1. I thought this was very cool way of solving this problem, nice work and thanks for sharing cacheman!

I wanted to verify that this solution still works with the latest release of ESXi 6.0 Update 1 and luckily it still does and here is a sample menu prompt that I created which prompts users for the networking settings for the ESXi host which will then be used by the ESXi Kickstart script. This is just one example of user prompts that can be created, this is only limited by your imagination and the amount of input you wish to put your users through 😉 If you are interested in the ASCII art, go to the very bottom for the full details.

Here are the exact instructions along with the sample menu that was used in the screenshot above.

Step 1 - Create a temporary directory which will be used to store our modified inittab file by running the following command:

mkdir -p temp/etc

Step 2 - Change into the "temp" directory

Step 3 - Copy the /etc/inittab file into the etc directory and you should have the following: temp/etc/inittab

Step 3 - Edit the etc/inittab file and comment out the following line:

#tty1::respawn:/bin/initterm.sh tty1 /bin/techsupport.sh

Step 4 - Next, we need to create a TGZ file of the etc directory by running the following command:

tar -czvf extras.tgz etc

Step 5 - Copy the extras.tgz to root of your ESXi installation if you are PXE booting or if you are re-authoring a new ESXi ISO

Step 6 - Edit the ESXi's boot.cfg configuration file and append the following after imgpayld.tgz:

--- extras.tgz

Step 7 - Finally, you will add your custom menu prompt into the %pre section of an ESXi Kickstart file. Below is an example Kickstart that I used to build the menu shown in the screenshot above.

accepteula
install --firstdisk --overwritevmfs
rootpw vmware123
reboot

%include /tmp/networkconfig

%pre --interpreter=busybox

exec < /dev/tty1 > /dev/tty1 2>&1
chvt 1
HOSTNAME=""
IPADDR=""
NETMASK=""
GATEWAY=""
DNS=""

while [[ "$HOSTNAME" == "" ]] || [[ "${IPADDR}" == "" ]] || [[ "${NETMASK}" == "" ]] || [[ "${GATEWAY}" == "" ]] || [[ "${DNS}" == "" ]] ; do
 echo
 echo " *** Please enter the following details: *** "
 echo
 read -p "Hostname: " HOSTNAME
 read -p "IP Address: " IPADDR
 read -p "Netmask: " NETMASK
 read -p "Gateway: " GATEWAY
 read -p "DNS: " DNS
done
clear

echo "network --bootproto=static --addvmportgroup=true --device=vmnic0 --ip=${IPADDR} --netmask=${NETMASK} --gateway=${GATEWAY} --nameserver=${DNS} --hostname=${HOSTNAME}" > /tmp/networkconfig

echo -e "Applying the following configuration: \n"
echo "Hostname = ${HOSTNAME}"
echo "IP Address = ${IPADDR}"
echo "Netmask = ${NETMASK}"
echo "Gateway = ${GATEWAY}"
echo -e "DNS = ${DNS}\n"
sleep 5
chvt 2

%firstboot --interpreter=busybox

sed -i 's/#tty1/tty1/g' /etc/inittab
/sbin/auto-backup.sh

vim-cmd hostsvc/enable_ssh
vim-cmd hostsvc/start_ssh
vim-cmd hostsvc/enable_esx_shell
vim-cmd hostsvc/start_esx_shell

Lines 10-11 - Redirects the output to /dev/ttyl and changes to tty1 virtual console.

Lines 12-16 - Define a couple of empty string variables that will be used to store user input.

Lines 18-28 - Prompt user input and loop until all variables are not empty.

Lines 30 - Using the user input, generate the networking configuration for the ESXi Kickstart.

Line 32-38 - Display the user input to the user and sleep for 5 seconds before switching back to the ESXi installer.

Line 39 - Change to /dev/tty2 virtual console which will show the regular ESXi installer menu.

Line 43-44 - Modify the /etc/inittab to re-enable ESXi Shell for /dev/tty1. For the changes to go into effect, you will need reboot and you can either do this when you need the capability (which is not ideal) or you can just automatically issue a second reboot in the %firstboot section of the Kickstart, so the ESXi Shell is available when you need it.

For those interested in how I added the ASCII art, I used this site here to generate the text. Once you are happy with the text and how it is displayed, which may require several rounds of testing, you will then want to save it to a file. In my setup I just called it vg-ascii.cfg and this should be placed on either your HTTP Server where the Kickstart is being pulled or embedded into the ESXi ISO if you are doing local installs only. You will then need to add the following lines to the "pre" section of the Kickstart right before the loading of the menu prompt. In this example, I am downloading the ASCII file from my web server which is also serving my kickstart and then clearing the screen before iterating through the file to display the text.

wget http://192.168.1.180/esxi60u1/vg-ascii.cfg -O /tmp/vg-ascii.cfg
clear
IFS=$'\n';for i in $(cat /tmp/vg-ascii.cfg);do echo $i;done