If you want to create an unattended installation of an ESX server you'll always get challenges with your SAN connection. During the boot process the HBA drivers (Qlogic and Emulex) are loaded and you'll have no way of telling whether a drive is your local drive or a SAN drive (unless you do a manual installation up front). One way to prevent this is just to disconnect or zone out your SAN LUN's. Another way is to remove the HBA drivers from the installation CD. I've been intrigued by Dinny Davies his method to remove the HBA drivers during boot. He has written a great manual how to do this. You can find it here. So what I did was the following: create a script which copies your ESX ISO to an ISO without SAN drivers.

Please note: I'm not a scripter. So most likely this script could be improved but for me: it works! On my laptop which is Ubuntu based, the creation of this new ISO without SAN drivers only takes 1 minute and 30 seconds.

Usage: # ./removehba.sh <esx3_iso>

Some notes:

• Try to put the script and ISO in the same folder.
• The script contains mount commands so you need to run this using a account which has enough rights (or like me, use sudo).
• This script changes the latest ISO (3.0.2 build 52542). If you would like to change the 3.0.1 iso, change the VERSION parameter into: 2.4.21-37.0.2.ELBOOT .
• Like the document describes, you'll need the 'mkisofs-2.01'. So this script will fail on an ESX server by default and UDA unless you install the mkisofs-2.01 tools. You could use a normal distro like Fedora or Ubuntu or ... or ... or ... (many distro's has the mkisofs buildin).

Use the script at our own risk. If you like it, please let me know.

Click here to download.