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.
