I use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to create custom ESXi iso images when upgrading or installing ESXi for customers but the process has some issues that I will address in this post.
The first issue is that you are unable to export the file because the port number in the URL is wrong and you get an “ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR” message in the browser.
This is resolved by removing :9084 from the URL in your browser.
Issue number two is that you are unable to download the ISO image if you have certain Vendor Addons included in the image. You are stuck with a task trying to download a 2 B file which never finishes.
The temp file at 1 KB does not grow at all.
This issue can be worked around by downloading the Vendor Addon from https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads and then uploading the file to vSphere LCM.
Select to upload the zip file you downloaded from https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads and wait for the Import updates task to finish.
Go back to your cluster and export the image again and it should now succeed.
I hope this post will help you get past two very annoying problems when trying to export custom ISO images using vSphere LCM.
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