The install stalls that are not really stalls, and the few that are
A black console, a boot message that makes no sense, an installer that seems frozen mid-copy - install-time stalls feel catastrophic and are usually anything but. Before the system exists, nothing can be broken permanently, which makes this the safest troubleshooting you will ever do. Match your symptom below and work the ladder; most fixes take under a minute.
Before diagnosing anything exotic: click inside the console window and press a key - Enter or an arrow key. Both the ESXi console and the installer blank their displays when idle, and a VM that has been sitting at the boot menu or a setup screen can simply be asleep on its feet. A surprising share of black screen reports end right here.
If the web console stays black even with clicks, use ESXi's Launch Remote Console option (VMRC) instead of the browser console. The standalone console application is noticeably more reliable than the browser window, especially for keyboard input during boot menus.
This message is the firmware reporting, accurately, that it found nothing to boot. On a brand new VM the cause is almost always the CD/DVD drive: the ISO was never uploaded properly, the drive points at the wrong file, or - the classic - Connect at power on was left unticked, so the drive sits disconnected exactly when the VM needs it.
Still nothing? Re-check the ISO itself - a download interrupted at 90 percent produces a file that exists, uploads, and silently fails to boot. Re-downloading the ISO fixes more installs than any clever trick.
The Try or Install Ubuntu Server menu waits only a short time for input, and the browser console only sends keystrokes when it has focus. If you were clicking around the ESXi interface when the VM started, your Enter presses went to the wrong window entirely.
The forgiving news: the menu's default action is to start the installer anyway, so a missed menu usually costs you nothing. And if the VM has gone past the point you wanted, there is no penalty for resetting it - before storage is written, an install can be restarted as often as you like with zero harm.
The long Installing system phase writes the entire operating system, and on a busy host or a slow datastore it can take far longer than the cheerful progress bar suggests. A stuck-looking installer that is still working is normal; one that has truly hung looks identical. Decide with evidence, not vibes:
Occasionally the installer crawls or freezes at a text screen - often a sign the VM is starved. Confirm you actually gave it reasonable resources (1 vCPU and under a gigabyte of RAM make everything feel broken), and that no other VM is currently consuming the entire host. Power off, adjust, and start again.
Also confirm the guest OS type was set to Ubuntu Linux (64-bit) when the VM was created. A generic type can leave the VM with legacy hardware defaults that confuse the installer. The settings guide on this page walks through the right choices; if the shell is wrong, recreating the VM takes three minutes and is faster than negotiating with a bad one. The failed attempt taught you the screens - the second run is always quicker.
The complete installation on a live ESXi host - creating the virtual machine and working through the installer screens exactly as they appear.
Watch Full VideoUsually not. Click into the console and press a key - the display blanks when idle. If the browser console still shows nothing, launch the standalone remote console (VMRC) from ESXi instead, and check the VM's power state and recent tasks for clues.
Yes. Until the installation finishes, the disk contains only a partial system that the next attempt will overwrite. Restart freely while troubleshooting the install itself. The caution applies later, once the finished server holds real data and services.
Check the VM's performance view in ESXi. Ongoing disk or CPU activity means it is working slowly, which is common on a loaded host or datastore. Truly flat activity plus an unchanged screen for a long period is the signal to power off, review the VM shell settings, and start the install again.