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But as any seasoned sysadmin knows, installing bare-metal hypervisors on OEM hardware can be a nightmare of missing drivers. If she used the standard VMware ISO, she’d spend hours hunting down HPE Smart Storage Array drivers, struggling with network interface card (NIC) recognition, and banging her head against the keyboard trying to configure the iLO (Integrated Lights-Out).

| Component | Vanilla ESXi 7.0 U3 | HPE Customized ESXi 7.0 U3 | |------------|----------------------|-------------------------------| | (lpfc, qlnative) | Generic | HPE-tuned with async versions | | Management agents | None | hp-ams (Agent Management Service) | | iLO cooperation | Basic | Enhanced hponcfg and hptestevent | | VIBs added | N/A | hpe-esxi-fc , hpe-smx-provider , hpe-nmi | | Boot time | Standard | +5 seconds (due to agent injection)|

Once downloaded and installed, SSH into your ESXi host and run:

You download the 800 MB ISO, boot the server via iLO, install, and – for the first time – esxcli hardware platform get returns HPE ProLiant with all sensors reporting. No red lights. No missing vmnic.

Since the transition of VMware to Broadcom, the download process has moved to the . Reddit·r/homelab

You’re staring at a server rack. In it, a ProLiant DL380 Gen10. You know vanilla VMware ESXi 7.0 works, but you’ve been burned before—missing drivers for the Smart Array controller, a NIC that drops packets every 48 hours, or a warning light that never turns green.