Once you have defined the hardware platform and the storage and network setup, you are ready to deploy the ESXi host. The installation is pretty simple and takes only a few minutes. The latest release of vSphere made an important enhancement in terms of security, introducing a new feature for the hypervisor—secure boot. Secure boot is a solution that ensures that only trusted code is loaded by the EFI firmware before the OS boots. The trust is given by the UEFI firmware that validates the digitally signed ESXi kernel against a digital certificate stored in the UEFI firmware.

Once you have defined the design of the virtual infrastructure, you should evaluate which installation option is suitable for your environment. vSphere 6.5 offers three options to deploy ESXi:

• Interactive: Manually providing answers to installation options
• Unattended: Using installation scripts
• Automated: Using the vSphere Auto Deploy feature

The deployment method to adopt depends on the size of your environment and on the number of hosts to install. Interactive installation is definitively the simplest procedure you can use but requires more time if you have several hosts to deploy. Automated installation is more complex to implement but for large environments is always the preferred choice.

Once you have defined how to install ESXi, you should ask yourself the question—where should I install ESXi? Let's examine the available options you may consider.