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How to create a customized ESXi ISO without vCenter Server?

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Historically, if you needed to create a customized ESXi ISO that included additional ESXi drivers, your only supported option was to use the vSphere Image Builder service, which has a dependency on vCenter Server. If you have an existing vCenter Server, this was not a problem and you could easily create a customized ESXi ISO using either the vSphere UI (example here) or the CLI with PowerCLI (example here).

Where this becomes a real challenge is for a greenfield or brand new deployment, where the default ESXi ISO can not be used as it does not contain the required networking and/or storage drivers for the desired hardware platform. Although this affects some customers who use hardware from the VMware HCL but it definitely has a bigger impact on the VMware Homelab community or anyone just getting started for the very first time.

While discussing this topic with a colleague recently, I actually came to learn about an alternative solution for creating a customized ESXi ISO without the need of vCenter Server! Thanks to fellow team member Blair Fritz, who now works in the VMware Cloud Product Management team, for the awesome tip.

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Easily create custom ESXi Images from patch releases using vSphere Image Builder UI

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Creating a custom ESXi Image Profile that incorporates additional ESXi drivers such as the recently released Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling or Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling is a pretty common workflow. Due to the infrequency of this activity, many new and existing users sometime struggle with the process to quickly construct a new custom ESXi Image Profile. I personally prefer to use the Image Builder UI that is built right into the vSphere UI as part of vCenter Server.

There are a couple of ways to create a custom new ESXi Image Profile using the Image Builder UI, but the easiest method is to use the Clone workflow, which is especially helpful when you are selecting an ESXi patch release as your base image.

With a regular major release, you only have to deal with two image profiles: standard (includes VMware Tools) and no-tools (does not include VMware Tools).

With an ESXi patch release, you actually have four image profiles: standard (includes VMware Tools + all bug/security fixes), security standard (includes VMware Tools + security fixes only), security no-tools (does not include VMware Tools + security fixes only) and no-tools (does not include VMware Tools + all bug fixes)

If you start with an empty custom image profile and then select your ESXi base image, you will notice there are multiple VIB version packages to select from since patch release you had imported earlier actually contains four different ESXi image profiles. Below are a step by step instructions on using the cloning workflow since this is a question I get from users who run into package conflicts not realizing they have selected the same package multiple times.

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Deploying NSX-T VIBs and/or creating custom NSX-T Image Profile

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Similiar to its earlier predecessor, NSX-T also provides complete lifecycle management (LCM) of its underlying NSX components (Controllers, Edges and Managers) including the Fabric Nodes (e.g. ESXi and/or KVM hosts). Additionally, a new Upgrade Coordinator is now part of NSX-T which greatly simplifies the patching and updating of the network virtualization platform. However, for existing vSphere customers who already have a process for distributing VMware VIBs using vSphere Update Manager (VUM) and/or custom Image Profiles, being able to leverage their existing methods is quite important. This is especially true for customers or system integrators who wish to slipstream all necessary VIBs as part of their base ESXi image for initial deployment which may come in the form of an automated installation via Kickstart and/or even manual install using an ISO image.

The good news is that like NSX-V, NSX-T also supports the same set of deployment methods that customers are already familiar with. I had recently looked into this due to a few questions that I and a few other folks had during our NSX-T Bootcamp training a couple of weeks back. I also did not see anything in the existing NSX-T documentation and figure it would be useful to outline the specific steps for each of the installation methods, especially when creating a custom ESXi Image Profile using PowerCLI which requires a particular order.

Note: Auto Deploy is currently not supported with NSX-T.

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