Since my lab is something that I probably will have to rebuild on multiple occasions throughout its lifecycle, I am going to build custom ISOs for each of my physical hosts so that it would be easy to rebuild them anytime.
VMware allows the utilization of a kickstart file to be injected in the ISO so that you can make it an almost silent install. The hardest part for me to build custom ISOs was being able to locate the install disk that I wanted to put vsphere on. There are many was to obtain this disk name but I ended up using a generic vsphere iso and loading that on each host in order to get the name for all the disks that I am going to use. While not the most efficient way of obtain those names it was the easiest in the end for me, just took some time to load each host up with the iso.
I don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel so I am not going to provide the step by step instructions on how to build a custom ISO, there are plenty of other good write-ups out there and a couple of the ones I use are below:
https://williamlam.com/2019/07/automated-esxi-installation-to-usb-using-kickstart.html
https://vcloud-lab.com/entries/blog/vmware-esxi-unattended-setup-building-a-kickstart-enabled-custom-iso-from-scratch
I used both of those above resources to build my custom ISOs for my physical hosts and I also found multiple examples for kickstart file configurations which ultimately let me to settle on something similar to the example below:
Feel free to use this to start your own kickstart installs, these are great at helping you get your ESXi hosts prepared for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployments and just overall maintaining consistency in your hosts.