** UPDATE ** – VMware have published updated documentation with 2 different methods to generate the ISO Located Here

I have recently been working on a solution to be able to build our ESXi hosts unattended. I know there is plenty of documentation out there on using PXE to kickstart ESXi installations but that unfortunately does not meet my use case – which is to streamline the ESXi installs at our remote locations where we do not have PXE / DHCP networks.

Based on the above, I wanted to put a kickstart script on the ESXi installer ISO which is automatically called (based on modifying the boot.cfg file) to install ESXi in a scripted fashion. The process to accomplish this is documented in the VMware Documentation Center Located Here

My idea to accomplish this seemed sound – and will save the detail for another day, but a major stumbling block I had come across was after creating the ISO file based on the instructions above, it would not boot on an EFI based host. The same ISO worked fine if you used a BIOS based machine.

Cue some serious digging around as to why, including a ticket to VMware for this, it turns out the documentation linked above will only create the boot sector on the ISO for BIOS machines. There is a separate bootstrap which has to be created at the ISO generation stage which allows the resulting ISO to boot both EFI and BIOS.

You can see what boot sectors are on the ISO by using a linux dumpet utility. I won’t go into details on this, but it’s a useful tool for looking at CDs / ISOs.

It turns out that VMware are not alone on this challenge! After much searching online it turns out that most Linux distributions fall foul of this same limitation, but I had managed to find some articles which led me down the right path to eventually solve this!

to resolve this, you need to change the mkisofs command on the vmware documentation to the following:

mkisofs -relaxed-filenames -J -R -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -eltorito-alt-boot -e efiboot.img -boot-load-size 1 -no-emul-boot -o customesxi.iso .

the key piece is the El Torito boot – this allows the ISO to strap the EFI bootable image. It turns out that EFI does not have support for ISO9660 file systems, so you have to create a GPT disk image containing the EFI images to boot.

Hope this helps! As for the VMware ticket – they have acknowledged this, and a request has been put into update the documentation.