The installation of the Intel NUC ESXi Hypervisor is very simple and straightforward. Ideally you would like to install the ESXi on supported Hardware for obvious compatibility reasons. In our case the Intel NUC 6i5SYH is not listed as a compatible one but the its components definitely are making this system a desirable Host. Moreover the low consumption energy can make the Intel NUC a good candidate for a 24×7 environment running into our home lab.
Also it is possible to either customise the standard ISO by injecting additional drivers or install these one at a later stage. For example this will be the approach I will be using when installing additional physical NICs by mean of USB Network Adapters. The Intel NUC just ships with 2 network cards: one wired and one wireless. VMware vSphere can only use the first one. So adding more network cards will give us the option to configure separate traffic types over different networks. More on this very topic on a specific article.
The installation takes just a few minutes and is wizard based.
Let’s select the intended drive for the deployment. In this case I prefer to use a local drive to perform the Intel NUC ESXi Hypervisor install. Then connect the VMware vSphere Hypervisor to iSCSI Block Storage from the Synology NAS.
And now the correct keyboard layout.
At this point let’s choose the password for the root account. This of course can be changed later on as well.
And a final confirmation before committing.
As per screenshot below the installation progress is very quick.
We are greeted with an excellent and relieving message! Let’s remove the USB drive and reboot the Intel NUC ESXi Hypervisor Host.
And we are now ready to get to the last part of this article series for the ESXi install first steps