Install VMware ESXi 6.5 on Intel NUC (Part 1/2)

With VMware vSphere 6.5 released recently, I decided to rebuild my Intel NUC based homelab. My preferred method is to create a bootable USB drive with the ESXi install media on it. Then install from the ESXi USB to the dedicated NUC’s boot USB. This method avoids non-unique ESXi installs, which is a common issue with the VMware Workstation pre-install method.

Prerequisites

In order to create our Intel NUC specific ESXi install media, we need to gather the necessary files. Make sure to grab the newest versions of the following:

• vSphere ESXi 6.5 Offline Bundle
  • This is a collection of all the components and packages that make up ESXi. You need the Offline Bundle, not the ISO, for this exercise.
• SATA AHCI driver
  • This driver is for the Intel NUC SATA controller. Even if your NUC doesn’t have a SATA disk or even the controller, it doesn’t hurt to add this driver.
• USB 3.0 Ethernet driver from William Lam
  • Add more NICs to your NUC via USB 3.0. Like the storage driver, if you don’t have a USB 3 ethernet adapter, it doesn’t hurt to add this driver.
• ESXi-Customizer-PS PowerShell script from Andreas Peets
  • This script will do all the heavy lifting, combining the offline bundle and driver VIBs into an ISO for us.

Create ISO

First, let’s create a project directory for our files. Let’s call it C:\esxi-nuc .

Copy the ESXi 6.5 offline bundle ZIP file (ex. VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-depot.zip ) and the ESXi-Customizer-PS script (ex. ESXi-Customizer-PS-v2.4.ps1 ) to this directory.

Create a sub-directory under our project directory to hold our VIBs. Let’s get creative and call it C:\esxi-nuc\vibs .

Copy the SATA AHCI driver VIB (ex. sata-xahci-1.38-1.x86_64.vib ) and the USB 3.0 Ethernet driver VIB (ex. vghetto-ax88179-esxi65.vib ) to this sub-directory.

If you’ve copied all the files to their respective folders properly, it should look something like this:

C:\esxi-nuc
C:\esxi-nuc\ESXi-Customizer-PS-v2.4.ps1
C:\esxi-nuc\VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-456106-depot.zip
C:\esxi-nuc\vibs
C:\esxi-nuc\vibs\sata-xahci-1.38-1.x86_64.vib
C:\esxi-nuc\vibs\vghetto-ax88179-esxi65.vib

Now we have to run the ESXi-Customizer-PS script to pull everything together and generate an ISO file. So fire up PowerShell, navigate to our project directory which is “C:\esxi-nuc” in our example, and run the following command:

.\ESXi-Customizer-PS-v2.4.ps1 -izip VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-depot.zip -pkgDir vibs -nsc

Make sure to use the version numbers that match your downloaded files. Also, don’t forget the “-nsc” flag, as that will let us ignore the unsigned driver VIBs and continue.

If everything went as planned, you should now have a new ISO file in the project directory that is an ESXi 6.5 and VIBs combination.

Next Steps

Now that we have our customized ISO, we need to turn it into a bootable USB and then install it on our NUCs. We’ll do just that in part two.

Featured image photo by JeepersMedia