Install VMware ESX4.1 via PXE

We recently received 2 new servers that I needed to install the newest ESX on. I downloaded the IOSs, but I did not want to have to burn them. So I decided to try and install ESX via PXE. I did not have an answer file (kickstart), so I wanted to run an interactive install from PXE.

I already had a PXE/TFTP server configured, so I just needed to add a new instance to the pxelinux.cfg file.

LABEL VMWARE-ESX
KERNEL images/vmware/esx/vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=images/vmware/esx/initrd.img vmkopts=debugLogToSerial:1 mem=512M url=http://server.name.local/vmware

The different options for “APPEND” can be found here. Works like a charm.

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