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 essential enhancement regarding security, introducing a new feature for the hypervisor—Secure Boot. Secure Boot is a solution that ensures that only the trusted EFI firmware loads code 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 6.7 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 most straightforward procedure you can use but requires more time if you have several hosts to deploy. Automated installation is more complicated to implement but for large environments is always the preferred choice.

There are, of course, additional steps to follow for unattended or automated installation, but in the end, it will save you a lot of time.

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