Unable to install opnsense 22.7 iso or img on ESXi 8.0

[kjkent]

Hi there,

I'm trying to migrate over from pfSense and I can't get the installer to work. I'm trying to install on an ESXi 8.0 hypervisor.

The img version (vga) would only boot if I mapped it onto a USB, but then failed at the installation stage wherein it gave an error relating to being unable to mount/invalid command (apologies for the vagueness, I've been trying to do this all evening and don't have the heart to reproduce it right now -- I'll post a screenshot tomorrow if necessary).

The iso image refuses to boot using efi or bios. The error i get is attached. Apologies for the picture of text.

If anyone has any words of wisdom it would be great to hear them, thanks.

Edit: the installation media is the latest available at time of writing

EDIT 2 (Losing the will to live edition): Right, so it seems the img error (attached now), is some whole can of worms to do with how EFI partitions were created before freeBSD 13 (copying some code over that in freeBSD 13 onwards corrupts the efi partition, see https://old.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/mvvloi/invalid_argument_response_to_mount_msdosfs/gvf25sf/)

I'm trying to create the partitions manually from the command line but christ, it doesn't like that either.

EDIT 3: Oh my GOD. It's nearly 5am here, I refused to give up, and it turns out the solution is such:

If running ESXi (at least 8.0) -- DON'T USE VMWARE PARAVIRTUAL AS YOUR SCSI CONTROLLER... It'll ruin your evening too. Changing to LSI Logic SAS immediately fixed the issue

I'm off to cry in bed; night all.

[johndchch]

once it's installed and running you can change back to paravirtual ( which should yield a tiny performance improvement over LSI emulation )  - it's only the installer that has this issue