The ESXi installer is refreshingly short — a handful of screens between you and a running hypervisor. It is also completely unforgiving about one thing: the disk you choose becomes ESXi's disk, entirely. This walkthrough slows down exactly where people lose data.
People imagine the ESXi install as the hard part of a whitebox build. In truth, once the hardware checks pass, the installer takes about ten minutes and asks very few questions. The danger is concentrated in a single screen — the disk list — where one careless Enter key can repartition the drive that holds your photos, your VMs from another project, or your Windows installation. This page walks the whole sequence so that screen gets the respect it deserves.
👆 ESXi lays out its own system area first and gives the remaining space to a VMFS datastore for your VMs. Whatever layout the disk had before does not survive (illustration — proportions simplified).
Boot the installer stick in UEFI mode. The progress screen that follows — a list of driver modules loading one by one — is secretly your first hardware verdict: it is the stage where an unsupported network card stops the show with the No Network Adapters error. If you sail through to the welcome screen, your hardware has already passed the test that defeats most whitebox builds.
The installer lists every storage device it can see: internal SSDs and hard disks marked as local, anything remote, and — the classic trap — the very USB stick you booted from can appear as an install target on some systems. Identify your intended disk by its model name and size, not by its position in the list. Then say the rule out loud before you press Enter: everything on this disk is about to be erased. If any doubt remains, stop, unplug the data disks, and start again with only the target disk connected. That two-minute detour has saved more data than any recovery software.
Pick the keyboard layout, then set the root password. Root on an ESXi host is not like an admin account on a PC — it is the single master key to every VM the host will ever run, so give it a long, unique password and store it somewhere proper. The final confirmation is the F11 key. Up to that moment every screen is reversible; after it, the disk is being rewritten. Treat F11 the way you would treat signing a form.
When the install completes, the installer asks you to remove the installation media and reboot. Do it — a host that boots back into the installer and loops has fooled many first-timers into thinking the install failed. The first real boot takes a little longer while ESXi settles its configuration, and then the grey-and-yellow DCUI appears with your host's address on it. That screen is the finish line.
On the target disk, ESXi created its boot partitions plus ESX-OSData, a system area for the host's own files, logs and scratch space — sized by the installer, up to roughly 128 GB on large disks. The remaining space on a reasonably sized disk becomes a VMFS datastore, usually named datastore1, which is where your virtual machines will live. On very small boot devices the installer may create no local datastore at all; in that case you add a second disk for VMs afterwards, which the storage page in this series covers.
Watch the install in the video before you run your own — knowing the screens in advance is what makes the disk choice a calm one.
▶️ Watch Full VideoNot in any supported or sane way. The installer takes the whole disk and writes its own layout. Give ESXi its own disk — a modest SSD is enough — and keep your Windows disk for Windows.
About ten minutes once the driver loading stage passes, plus a few minutes for the first boot. If your install seems to take an evening, the problem is almost always hardware detection, not the installer itself.
Some consumer NVMe controllers and RAID-mode BIOS settings hide the drive from ESXi. Check that the storage controller is in plain AHCI or NVMe mode rather than a motherboard RAID mode, and confirm the drive appears in the BIOS itself. The storage case guide in this series goes deeper.