You download Cisco Custom ISOs from VMware’s website. You must use Cisco’s portal:

esxcli software profile get

The ESXi Cisco Custom ISO is non-negotiable for any production deployment on Cisco UCS hardware. It eliminates driver hell, ensures hardware monitoring works, and keeps your environment within VMware’s and Cisco’s support policies.

The most critical function of the Custom ISO is network driver inclusion. Cisco VIC cards use specialized networking drivers (such as the enic driver for Ethernet and fnic driver for FCoE). The Custom ISO ensures these are present during the installation phase, allowing the host to pull an IP address via DHCP immediately. Without this, an administrator is forced to manually inject drivers via CLI or reinstall the host—a time-consuming process in large-scale deployments.

Expected output: (Cisco-xxx)

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