@thecount1829 Well I don’t see this as a total waste of time. Mainly because you now know more than you did this AM. You also learned how to debug pxe booting issues. Knowing where to look is the key.
As I tell the youngins I mentor, “If it would have worked the first time, what would you have learned?”. Its all good here. In the end you solved the problem and can keep moving with your project. Well done!!
issue was with the actual ISO and is now resolved!
With easy mode vmware must tailor the VM config to match the settings on the install ISO. I have vmware workstation 15 on my office computer I’ll have to see if there is a way to tweak the VM this way.